I’ve set up the foundations. It is working whimsically as of now, but it has great promise. It is certainly necessary to perfect this since the full game test we made today caused all 3 dogs to get stuck into each other and couldn’t continue playing unless taken away from each other. In a real game they would have all gotten penalized for 30 seconds…Not a good thing!
Before the dog goes into approach state, it considers whether there is another dog that is closer to the ball. If there is, stay put. This is all based on communicated localization from other dogs on the field. Eventually, we could give idle standers-by some other work while a single robot approaches the ball.
Just for those who thought that this wasn’t possible–oh it’s possible. AND I just fixed a major glitch in the width reporting Vertical Scanning vision system. The ball is much more accurately represented in our model and this should lead to better aligning on the ball.
The role switching had a problem where a dog would trap the ball, and as soon as it lost sight of it, it would report that it doesn’t know where the ball is, and so all the others would start looking for it. Now a dog also passes a boolean of whether or not it has the ball trapped.