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Subject: 
Re: turtle coding kit (Re: How would we (the rest of us) communicate ideas to the MDP?)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:42:09 GMT
Viewed: 
2381 times
  
In lugnet.robotics, Brian Davis wrote:

if NXT is to be an "iPod for robotics", I think
this has to be included, and be dead-on reliable.
Then FLL teams... can get on with the business of
coding actual robot behaviors instead of endlessly
tweaking one-shot navigation routines.

   I don't know - a lot of good FLL robots don't bother with complicated
dead-reckoning, but use either "point and shoot" techniques, or correct based on
landmarks. Having three encoders opens up some wonderful new options - but some
of the old "KISS" methods shouldn't be ignored either.

I'd go further than that - I may be wrong here, but AFAIK professional
roboticists largely consider dead reckoning to be a losing game, an amateur
red-herring that you can waste all the time and money you want on and it will
still never work reliably - traction differs as the robot travels various
surfaces, wheels slip, a pet or collision or other interaction moves the robot
without it being aware, a gear slips, etc etc. Watching a motor counter instead
of the world seems to be the one way to guarentee that a robot never knows where
it is, where to go, or how to navigate the obstacles around it.

I don't know anything about the FLL competitions, but it sounds like they're
designed to offer highly consistant conditions in order to make dead-reckoning a
plausible design approach. I wonder if this might work slightly against learning
about making real-world useful robots? Motor counters are incredibly useful in
all sorts of ways for robots and other Mindstorms things, but if people are
excited over their potential applications for navigation, that seems like
something isn't right.

But like I said, I'm not familiar with how the FLL comps work.



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: turtle coding kit (Re: How would we (the rest of us) communicate ideas to the MDP?)
 
In lugnet.robotics, Justin Fisher wrote: <snip> (...) When I was a mentor for a local FLL team, I was so hard pressed to convince the kids that 'dead reconing' wasn't the way to go. THey had the entire program coded like 'go straight for 10 seconds, (...) (19 years ago, 22-Feb-06, to lugnet.robotics)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: turtle coding kit (Re: How would we (the rest of us) communicate ideas to the MDP?)
 
(...) The question is just how much of this is handled at what level within the NXT firmware & software. I'd be surprised if LEGO doesn't do *something* with the built-in encoders - after all, *they* put them there. the question is how much. The (...) (19 years ago, 22-Feb-06, to lugnet.robotics)

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