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RE: Steam


Of course there IS an davantage when 1/30 of exporation time is added to the
run time - that was originally put in to reward 'smart' mice and not just
persistent ones.

The Hitachi chip in the Gameboy camera is particularly esy to interface.
It's pretty light, too!  No need to pull it down.

The 'slim mouse' you describe sound a lot like one of David Otten's!

Repackage his reflective sensors in fancy terms, and you could say that he
is using shaped light with a distributed vision system.


Cheers

John
-----Original Message-----
From: A Johnstone [mailto:adrian@dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk]
Sent: Friday, 30 June 2000 18:28
To: John Billingsley
Cc: micromouse@dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk
Subject: RE: Steam



Piers Plummer and I have discussed several times using a camera this way.
The idea was to put a camera on an electric arial and extend it up to
where the whole maze could be seen, pull it down again when the image
processing has been done and then just run to the centre. However, as long
as the scoring system rewards only the fastest run, there's no real
benefit because in ten minutes a mouse with good enough dynamics to make a
fast run also has enough time to exhaustively explore the maze.

On a a related note. My mouse EMMA (Adrian's micromouse engine,
backwards; also my daughter's name) comprises two pancake steppers, an
ADSP 2181 DSP chip and an Omnivision video camera which delivers digital
data without any need for an external ADC. The idea is to build a very
slim mouse with no extraneous arms hanging off of it so that it will have
excellent dynamics and will be able to run up the middle of a diagonal
without needing to slew round corners. At the moment, this mouse comprises
a pile of components and I don't even know if the motors will develop
useful amounts of torque so I don't claim that this is the last word, but
I do hope that in a few years time we'll have a new competition category
for vision guided mice. (BTW I did my PhD in machine vision so this isn;t
a complete fantasy. All I have to do is find the time to build the
thing...)

                          Adrian


On Fri, 30 Jun 2000, John Billingsley wrote:

> Sorry - for decades the rules have said that the mouse must 'negotiate the
> maze - no jumping etc'.  
> 
> One proposed gizmo in the early days was to use a high-mounted camera and
> map the maze as a panorama - something the Finnish Microsaurus did by
sonar.
> 
> Now that video cameras are so small, how about it?
> 
> 
> Cheers
> 
> John

Dr Adrian Johnstone, Senior Lecturer in Computing, Computer Science Dep, 
Royal Holloway, University of London,  Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, England.
Email a.johnstone@rhbnc.ac.uk Tel:+44(0)1784 443425 Fax:+44(0)1784 439786