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SourceBots Agenda 2018-06-25

To Discuss

  • The Student Robotics Meeting happened.
    • Retro from a SB perspective?
      • Student Robotics is back.
      • Student Robotics appears to be open to being run by volunteers.
      • General consesus is that we are mostly happy to run the next Student Robotics competition (citation needed), assuming that Student Robotics acts the way they claim.
      • Everything in Student Robotics is basically going to be organised by the Core Team, and SR seem to be very open as to having new members of said core team.
    • What is the future for the SourceBots brand?
      • For large scale competitions, we are likely to return to the SR brand, as it is well known and it will be easier to get teams with this branding.
      • For Smallpiece, this year we are running it under the SourceBots brand, but we will need to discuss in more detail what we intend to do for later years.
      • We are keeping sourcebots open for a year just in case anything happens with SR again
  • Vision at Smallpeice
    • Are we having vision?
      • Currently the plan is for not having the game rely on vision, we have not yet decided if we will make vision available as an optional sensor or if we will just not bother
    • What are the alternatives?
      • Just not having any extra sensors, remove vision and that's it.
        • Boring
        • Probably not enough for an interesting game.
      • Alternative sensors (possibly several options)
        • Ultrasound: works on small scales with hard surfaces.
        • Radar: works on medium scales? Cheap.
        • lidar: works on self-driving cars (EXCITING), costs like £50-£70 per sensor though
          • We have theoretically unlimited budget though for smallpiece.
        • Alternative sensors make game design more complicated (each sensor must be at least somewhat useful in the game)
          • Perhaps a game where the visison needed is just distances, but rewards accuracy vs distance vs precision.
        • Could just make the game around one particular sensor that isn't vision.
        • Detecting the world -> Interpreting the world -> Taking action
  • Odroid things

    • This is SR related
      • Probably best left to after the core team meeting.
    • Will it be possible to port our software to the Odroid for SR2018/19
      • Will we want to port our software (probably yes)?
      • Will we want to upgrade the SR kit instead (probably 19/20)
      • Is it worth running our new software for this year's competition, when we have working software already.
      • Conclusion: don't know about the feasibility of porting, however at the end of the day we will need to decide in a meeting of the core team what exactly we're doing software-wise.
      • Next year integrate hills road, SB & SR into software together
      • Need to focus on smallpiece this year, what we need to do with SR is in the minutes
  • Reminder for people looking to be on SR core team: check your email subscribed to sourcebot's (google groups) mailing lists, you should have a forwarded SR email. Limit is 29th Sign up here for the core team

To Do

Continue going through the Smallpeice spreadsheet

Game Submissions https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Nz6ALxfFacLY26c9E0Z0l5uViY4PNJZt?usp=sharing