Hi All,
Thought that I would start a discussion to try and help out anyone who is contemplating competing in the Sparkfun 2014 AVC.
I learned a lot while attending the 2013 AVC and I would like to share my thoughts with you concerning what I did right and what I did wrong.
1) If you live in Florida, don't try to drive to the AVC in Boulder, CO by yourself like I did.:-)
2) Make sure that you get to the vehicle competition course on race day early enough to make a couple of test runs.
3) Actually, go out to the course the afternoon before after they have set up the obstacles and take an accurate GPS coordinate reading of each obstacle and compare those readings to the "advertised" GPS coordinates.
4) Expect that a lot of the competitors in your class will have their vehicles go wild at the start and try to run over your rover so make sure that it can take a hit from the side and keep on moving.
5) Unless you are very lucky, expect to make minor waypoint corrections after the first heat.
6) It really helps to have an assistant or a team member to help you keep track of what is going on during the heats and to watch the far end of the course which you can't see from the starting line due to the hay bales.
Replies
From me some things that went very well:
1. we set-up a virtual race in the auto-tester a few weeks before the competition. This forced us to work through in detail how we were going to run the course, where the barriers were etc, and also ensured that any code changes didn't break anything.
2. we were conveniently near the end of a development cycle (i.e. AC3.0 was just about ready to be released) so the code was relatively stable. Of course we could have always used a more stable version of the code (i.e 2.9.1b) but AC3.0 provided major advantages in control.
3. on the copter side we had a large number of teams using the APM / ArduCopter meaning our chances of succeeding were naturally quite high.
4. the copters could fly much faster while still maintaining control than expected
Things that were unexpected or we could have done better:
i) the high altitude had a much larger than expected impact on the copter and plane's performance. Moving up from 10" to 11" props helped resolve this. Next time we should ensure that we all have overpowered copters 'cuz they'll be at least 20% weaker at the high altitude.
ii) we should have had a spotter down by the wicket because although we got through on most runs, I think we were very close to hitting it a few times but just didn't know.
iii) we should use sonar for low altitude portions of the flight (i.e. when getting under the wicket).
iv) fly fast. keep increasing the speed if your runs are going ok.
Tom, thanks for posting this! Great for newbies and oldies alike.
#4 has always been of great concern to me and I still don't have a really good answer yet.