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Subject: 
Re: 8448 Street Sensation Racing - Are you game?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Thu, 30 Sep 1999 23:36:01 GMT
Viewed: 
606 times
  
Throwing out some more racing ideas:
On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Jacob Schultz wrote:

Ian Sinclair wrote:
Stage Three is full autonomous control with line following capability,
IR sensor in front for collision avoidance, and smart programming so
it can find its way back to the race track after loosing its way on
tight turns.

I'm thinking a stock-only (or nearly stock- rotation and extra
light-sensors are legit) version, so IR is out.

What do you have in mind for smart programming? A simple back and forth
algorithm, or something that has an idea of where it is in relationship
to the track?

Stage Four is really intelligent programming that learns the track,
knows to gear down and slow at tight corners.

Sounds like a good idea for you 8448 owners... for the rest of us,
gearing would be overkill. I like the idea of learning the track, though.

Stage Five is racing other powered RCX controlled 8448 cars on a big
track.  The track will be a black electrical tape route on concrete
for multiple cars.

I might suggest that instead of tape, you create a thick line, which
gradates from white to black on curves. Two light sensors can then be
used to figure the direction of the curve. Do it big enough so that you
can have multiple cars along the same width of track- it would allow for
more realistic racing, as the car would be cognizant of it's own position
on the track (without a great deal of computation) and be able to interact
with other RCXs, pushing them off (for example) if it knew it was near
the edge.

Take a look at http://arthurdent.dorm.duke.edu/legos/archive/track2.jpg
to see what I mean (sorry if the server is a bit slow today... it is
ungodly slow the past couple of days.) Also, the .jpg is not great- but
with the fuzzing at the edges, you can get the gist of what I mean.

This could almost be a challange. How about marking up a circuit by
marking the curbs with black tape. Then let the car race around trying
to map the circuit and find the way through. After a coupple of laps it
could finish "learning mode" and try to make better and better lap
times. This should be possible using LegOS, but NQC is probably not
efficient enough.

Actually learning the course (or learning anything, for that matter)
would probably be pretty difficult in just a few laps, unless it was a
very simple track and simplistic algorithm, especially when you are
feeding it so little data. Plus, that kind of thing is very intolerant of
the things that make racing interesting- crashes :) Letting the racers
"see" the track by gradating it would be more interesting, IMHO. If I can
figure out a way to make it subsumptive, I'll have a race of six cars
sometime soon (then again, I've said that before:)

Hoping to hear more ideas about this race thing- esp. anything related to
tactics or legOS-
Luis

#######################################################################

     Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand.
                  -Anonymous

#######################################################################



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: 8448 Street Sensation Racing - Are you game?
 
(...) i.e. 100% Pure Lego. (25 years ago, 1-Oct-99, to lugnet.robotics)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: 8448 Street Sensation Racing - Are you game?
 
(...) This could almost be a challange. How about marking up a circuit by marking the curbs with black tape. Then let the car race around trying to map the circuit and find the way through. After a coupple of laps it could finish "learning mode" and (...) (25 years ago, 30-Sep-99, to lugnet.robotics)

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