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Put your ideas for colony here. No matter how far-fetched, they will always have a home. Try not to flood this page without getting any work done (like what I'm doing right now).

http://roboticsclub.org/redmine/wiki/colonyscout

Obedient Colony

  • Implement algorithms that allow the robots take human input and repeat those tasks
    • i.e. Via Colonet, user inputs a series of commands to complete task A. Whenever a robot needs to or is instructed to perform task A, it repeats the user's commands

Handheld Remote Control Colony

  • Modify a universal remote (or create our own) and add a receiver (modify BOM?) to accept remote control input
  • Allow user to select robots and issue commands via the remote control
  • Laser pointer!?! "Go there robot!"

The Carrier

  • Big mobile robot that carries 4+ normal colony robots in its cargo hold
  • Used for rapid deployment and on the go recharging / computing / resource station
  • Onboard GPS and Homing beacons for absolute positioning and static reference localization
  • High bandwidth connection "back home" for data relaying and remote, remote control of robot colony
  • Onboard data storage for logging SLAM data

Next-gen Colony

  • Recess the center front sharp so the minimum readable value represents an object touching the front of the robot
    (see Dshope Colony Redesign for more details)

Colony GPS

  • No explanation necessary

Integrated Wireless

  • Atmel Z-link Technology

Wireless Programming

  • Should already have bootloader support

Library improvements

  • Add more debugging support
    • Logging errors to a 'file' in eprom and reading afterwards
    • an ASSERT macro which stops the robot and turns the orb red on failure
    • A packet analysis tool for wireless packets (use an existing one?)
  • Protect timers
    • Prove a very low level timer library which would ensure multiple pieces of code aren't trying to use the same timers / OCRs
    • Could have something like SET_TIMER_REG1(x) where x is the usual bit values for the timer register
    • #undef the timer registers afterwards to prevent manual modification
  • Require every c file in the library to implement a "test" function which runs basic unit tests on the driver
    • This could be enabled with a "debug mode" compile time flag so the code isn't present when not needed