AVC

[Ted Meyers]

Anyone have any AVC news?  I thought Sparkfun was supposed to contact team captains at some point for schedule and team info.  About a month until the big day!

[jesse brockmann]

Ted,

  That should come out in next day or two.  There are a ton of combat bots and they are trying to figure out how to handle it.  There was a post about it at avc site.

Jesse

On Sep 11, 2017 3:25 PM, "Ted Meyers" <ted.m...@gmail.com> wrote:

Anyone have any AVC news?  I thought Sparkfun was supposed to contact team captains at some point for schedule and team info.  About a month until the big day!

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[Jon Watte]

I'm less than a month in on a new job, so I don't have the time to go to Colorado this year.

I'm racing at the Oakland self-driving car meet-ups, though!

Looking forward to seeing what y'all are coming up with this year.

Sincerely,

jw

Sincerely,

Jon Watte


--
"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson

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[Ted Meyers]

Wow, a lot of combat bots (87!), wonder how many will actually show.  And 54 autonomous bots.  I expect that most of those are classic AVC, so about the usual number. 

[Ted Meyers]

I posted some videos on my youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0emK7CaOrTC0itlf4B9mKQ

Mostly videos of my own bots, but I got one of Jesse's bot.  Sorry for the poor video quality and total lack of editing.

I think there were about 40 "Speed Demon" bots and 9 "Car Wars" entries.

Ted

[Wayne Holder]

Thanks for posting the videos.  I haven't been able to make it to AVC for the past few years, but it looks like things have evolved quite a bit.  The barrels now seem like quite a daunting challenge given the small space available to squeeze though and the maneuvering room on the track seems smaller, too.  What method did you use to navigate?

Wayne

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[Ted Meyers]

Wayne, wish you would come; you are always a great competitor, with well engineered bots.

I used dead reckoning (wheel encoders & gyros) with accelerometer data to detect collisions (and attempt to get around obstacles).  I also had a Lidar-Lite mounted on a servo for scanning the barrels.  Lidar worked well in testing and the lidar is rock solid outside and even on the hay bales, but when I got out on the course and tested on Friday/Saturday morning, it appeared that the lidar was freaking out intermittently and spamming the I2C bus, and blocking the gyro signal (a power/noise issue -- my best guess anyway).  Didn't always happen, but frequently enough that it was more than likely to mess up a run.  So, I unplugged the lidar -- problem solved, but that left getting through the barrels up to a bump and go strategy.  With a few less barrels, or if they were a bit further apart, no problem, but they way they were configured, my bots were only able to get through about 1 in 4 tries without getting stuck.

Navigation with the ride-on vehicle was much easier, as there were no obstacles.  It was a bit challenging, as I only had a few runs on the course to calibrate (most of the day, the obstacles were on the course -- along with a lot of other vehicles/obstacles).

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