With a heavy heart, PiWars has been postponed and a Virtual PiWars has been announced for April 25th prior to a full competition being run. This is very much the right thing to do and I totally support it. One thing this does mean is more time to overcomplicate expand functionality! Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about that I’m going to investigate further.
I’ll start running through these in order, based on the MoSCoW priority system. It’s a simple way of prioritising tasks.
This page is going to be updated each time a task is done with relevant links added to blog posts or videos.
To MoSCoW!
Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have. A logical follow up to my previous post on the MVP of MFP.
Must Haves
The robot must:
- Be drivable by remote control
Motion controlDone, 29/3/20- Arm control
- Manual control
- Preset positions for grab/lift/drop
Head controlDone, 31/3/20- Weapon control
- Sensors
- Perimeter distance sensors
- Line follow/cliff sensors on bumpers
- Video feed over WiFi
- Blinkenlights!
On robot battery charging (BMS)Charge port added (14/3/20)Controller internal batteries/charging (BMS)Done, 29/3/20
Should Haves
The robot should:
- Provide a stereo feed to a Google Cardboard enabled phone
- Provide sensor feedback over WiFi to the controller
- Arms upgraded with compliant joints
- A voicebox!
- Power monitoring on the battery, displayed on controller
- Voltage
- Current
- Charging state (LED on robot too)
Could Haves
- Full motion and arm control using puppeteering rig
- Computer vision for
- Line following
- Barrel sorting
- Automation
- SLAM/Similar
- Navigation for the blind maze
- Navigation for barrel sorting
- Target detection for Zombie Defense
Must Not
- Be on fire
- Break down, unless incredibly funny
- Gain self awareness and take over the world (unless it has a good plan for public services)
