[Dprglist] Sample Retrieval vacuum cleaner

[John Swindle]

Doug,
It's more than 24" if you go diagonally across the cube, instead of diagonally across the square, and cubes are bigger than spheres. Maybe an oversight: there's no height limit. I made a space frame for one of the outdoor competitions that made the separation as great as possible. (Recall I asked if I could tip the robot onto a corner so that the volume met the size limits but it had a bigger footprint? Shot down.) That contest did have a 3D size limit. 3D measurements are a pain, but they are necessary because of floor and ceiling echoes.
I have a new vision idea: Shove stuff out of the way and look for painter's tape. Remember where all the tape is. On subsequent run, collect everything that the judges put on top of the painter's tape. Just shove things around and look at the floor, without regard to the objects. Totally missing the point, as usual. That's a vision system I might like. Probably use the same vision system as on line following, with a strain gauge!
General rule suggestion: I think collaboration is the essence of engineering. I learned more from my roommates on the floor of the frat house than I did from my professors. I think it would be a step forward to share information between competitors, in all of the contests. Maybe consider the competitors to be a team, as with car racing where several drivers are racing for the same team. In the spirit of autonomy, I think it would be improper for someone to tell someone else what the coordinates are and just key them in, but if the same info were exchanged by the machines automatically, without being keyed in on either machine, I think that would be cool.

Thanks for indulging all my odd ideas.
John Swindle

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Paradis <paradug at gmail.com>
To: John Swindle <swindle at compuserve.com>
Cc: Ron Grant <deltagraph at aol.com>; DPRG <dprglist at lists.dprg.org>
Sent: Sun, Jan 20, 2019 7:08 pm
Subject: Re: [Dprglist] Sample Retrieval vacuum cleaner

John,    If you placed your robot in the contest measurement box at 45 degrees and your robot was roughly round, you could have a max outside dimension of about 24 inches for your receivers.
In regard to the clarification you pointed out, yes, an individual competitor's entry could remember previous runs, kinda like MicroMouse running the maze several times. That competitor just couldn't share the mapping data with another competitor. 
I will have to take several of the points that have come out in this discussion and capture them on the rule clarifications web-page.. 
Regards,Doug P.




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