by

|   April 14, 2009 at 1:54 PM

I am so bummed that this is on a wednseday. I got all my design work done and started scavenging parts before I realized the man was going to keep me from playing.

I'm looking forward to hearing how it goes. Let's make next year's on a saturday!

Thanks to sparkfun for encouraging this kind of thing in Colorado. I am always disappointed that there is so little grass roots robotics/electronics/general making stuff in this area.

by

|   April 14, 2009 at 5:40 PM

It's on Wednesday because no-one in Colorado is still employed except government & Sparkfun.

by

|   April 15, 2009 at 5:28 AM

So that means when the economy is better it will be on a Saturday? Anyways for me day of the week isn't as important as the season. Ideal for me would be to have this in the later in spring or the fall season so if I came out there for a week I could enjoy the Colorado landscape at it's best.

Whenever the next one happens, I'm going to have a serious think about competing. It's a significant trip from my home base of Massachusetts, but if I can bundle it into a vacation I might convince the lady to make a holiday out of it.

I look forward to seeing the results later today!

by

|   April 15, 2009 at 8:27 AM

You might like this too:
http://www.dtu.dk/subsites/robocup.aspx

by

|   April 15, 2009 at 2:44 PM

That UAV in the tree is so PRICELESS!!!

by

|   April 15, 2009 at 3:47 PM

As expected, the fixed wing was way beyond the rovers. That's why all the jobs are in Calif*.

by

|   April 15, 2009 at 4:10 PM

Here's some pictures from the event:

http://www.circuitsathome.com/uncategorized/sparkfun-autonomous-vehicle-competition

by

|   April 15, 2009 at 6:56 PM

Looks like the fastest rover didn't have any position sensing. He must have used encoders & recorded 1 manual lap, then programmed it to play it back as fast as possible. We may never know.

by

|   April 16, 2009 at 8:34 AM

Calif: Looks like the fastest rover didn't have any position sensing. He must have used encoders & recorded 1 manual lap, then programmed it to play it back as fast as possible. We may never know.

That does not sound very autonomous to me. Kind of like drawing a line around the building for a line follower to follow.

by

|   April 16, 2009 at 8:46 AM

Can somebody please create some kind of profile page for each team?

I am interested in seeing what each bot looked like + knowing more about the guts of each aswell.

by

|   April 16, 2009 at 8:51 AM

The winning rover has a build blog.
http://deathpod3000.wordpress.com/

by

|   April 16, 2009 at 11:42 AM

I am the builder of deathpod3000, the fastest ground vehicle. The car has gps, digital compass and infrared distance sensors. It does not have encoders. The bot follows lat/long waypoints set into the eeprom on the microprocessor from the gps. It uses gps and compass to navigate the waypoints when in gogogo mode. It uses the ir sensors to steer around obstacles while it is navigating the waypoints. This is what allowed it to complete the course. gps alone isn't accurate enough. It only follows the curb to avoid hitting it and it continues navigating as soon as it doesn't sense the curb or it gets close enough to the waypoint.

It also has logic to figure out that because of waypoint "movement" due to gps error, it can't reach a waypoint and it needs to skip to the next waypoint. This kicked in during the first run where it went too far right and starting following the curb in the wrong direction. After about 4 feet, it turned around and continued down the course.

I have put up many pics and a couple videos from the event on my build blog.

http://deathpod3000.wordpress.com

by

|   April 16, 2009 at 2:10 PM

We (DIY Drones) were the wining team, with an UAV powered by ArduPilot, the autopilot we designed and Sparkfun sells. The project page is here:
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844:BlogPost:44814