Data Collection at the Barricades

Nate and were assigned to buggy chores today. Fortunately, we made the best of our situation. We were stationed at the chute, and we were given a perfect view of the buggies maneuvering around the corner. We snapped some videos of the buggies on my Droid. There's about 19 videos from of buggies going around that chute. We have decided that this is going to be one of the hardest parts of RoboBuggy.

Here's an experienced driver successfully taking the curve: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRjjDDHCIeM

This is going to be a really difficult task, as there are little land marks around the curve that the RoboBuggy would be able to pick up on. Our current solution is to put additional flaggers (or just unmanned flags) around the hay bales as visual cues for RoboBuggy.

In addition to filming the other buggies, we put a camera on our own buggy, Kamikaze, and our driver Emily provided us with a nice perspective of what RoboBuggy will see. I've seen a few first person views of buggies, but this one is pretty cool.

AEPi's Kamikaze: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpOcE-b1Whg

We're open to any suggestions on how we should deal with the curve. It looks like we're going to tackle the free roll the same way they did it in the past, with line following. Also, I apologize for providing links intead of embedding video. Blogspot didn't want to upload them for some unknown reason.

-Alex