Jordan Perr

A necessary but mundane task of programming any vehicle’s autonomous drive system is filtering the noise out of encoder and accelerometer sensory data. To demonstrate the noisiness of our sensors to the rest of the FRC team, I decided to create visual aids using Microsoft Excel. The following graph shows both sets of data over time during smooth acceleration and deceleration.

Accelerometer and encoder data on progbot for a "smooth" driving trial.

Accelerometer and encoder data for a very rough trial with progbot. The wheels were slipping at points during this trial.

Pointdrive is a revolutionary control system developed by me and a small team of programmers for Stuyvesant FRC’s 2007-2008 season. The system includes a bezier curve interpreter (written in C) onboard the robot’s IFI PIC18 RC unit as well as an AdobeSVG file converter on the host PC. This novel system allows drivers to literally draw the desired autonomous drive routine atop a map of the competition field, greatly reducing pre-match glitches and debugging.

• The code for Pointdrive is located somewhere in this subversion repository.
• The Adobe SVG parsing script is located here.