Remind me why I am doing this again?

By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed wiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish.

-- George Orwell, 1984

Here we are, three weeks until the contest. I have no motivation to do this, but at the same time no desire to call it off. As I hate making decisions by default, that means I have to do it. Since I am unlikely to win the contest, nothing tangible is gained by finishing. Last time, I was tremendously motivated, to the point of using every waking hour, even to the point of taking vacation time to work on the robot. This time I can barely motivate myself to take a weekend to work on it. I just can't get into it.

Yesterday I went to the course. As the newspaper says, "'Tis a privilege to live in Colorado". One benefit is that with 20 minutes of driving and $6.25 to get in the gate, I can visit the course whenever I want. I did so yesterday, with the robot brain on a breadboard. I had the GPS on and locked, connected through the Arduino Nano used as a pure passthrough for its FT232 chip. This was piped through the SiRFDemo program running on Natsumi, and recorded.

Yesterday, however, they were setting up for the Boulder Triathlon. I guess I take a certain amount of inspiration from the runners in that race. Thousands of people join up, most of them with no thought of winning, just finishing. Similarly, I do not plan on winning. I just want to do this so that I can say that I finished something. I am not doing this again by myself. Next time, I plan on being part of a team, preferably as a sponsor/adviser.

In any case, here is the plan. I am going to do this by waypoint navigation. The robot will continuously estimate its 2D position and heading (speed doesn't matter). The position estimate will come straight from the GPS. The heading will be a Kalman filtered result from the GPS heading (to remove gyro biasing) and the gyro (for precision and response time). Perhaps GPS position will work in as well, if I can figure out how.

The hardest part is deciding what to do when we are close to the waypoint. I can easily imagine the waypoint getting inside of the robot's turning circle and the thing chasing its tail forever in vain.

Imagine we have three consecutive waypoints, one at the start line (point 0), one at the first turn (point 1), and one at the second turn (point 2). Also imagine we have just left the start line and are heading towards the first turn. How do we know when to turn? Also, what course do we steer heading towards the point? I think we want to set an imaginary steer-to point (point 1') about 20 meters beyond the actual waypoint 1, on the line from point 0 through point 1. We steer towards 1', while keeping track of the dot product between the vector from point 1 to point 0 and the vector from point 1 to the robot. When this dot-product becomes negative, we have crossed a line perpendicular to the line from 0 to 1. At this time, we set the target point to point 2', 20m beyond waypoint 2 on the line from 1 to 2. We then change all the indexes and steer towards point 2'.

The 20m is arbitrary, but intended to be larger than the GPS error.