Micromouse conference - Minos 08 - report 1

So Alan and I are on our way to this tiny conference. Got up at 4:50 (yawn) to get the significantly cheaper flight. The plane was overbooked but we were eventually able to get on anyway in the end (last two people on - it was close enough that they talked to us about
bumping us to the next flight).

We'd hoped to have our mouse running, but it's not quite there. We have done most of the vision processing as a Cocoa application. This allows us to process pictures taken by the robot and process them into, ultimately, wall/robot positional data.

At the moment the Cocoa application does everything except properly convert the coordinates to the world domain. I was working on a couple of constants we need to insert and haven't had a chance to try them on the program over the last few nights.

I've volunteered do a presentation at the conference to show people what we've been doing. We spent Wednesday and Thursday writing this presentation and I spent last night packing (mostly). However, I have to be careful not to focus overly on the presentation slides and
actually show people the program - which is what I really want to present.

After the conference we need to finish the world coordinate conversion and then do a port to embedded robot code of the vision processing algorithms. The Cocoa app was definitely not written for execution speed or a small RAM footprint, but it shouldn't take very long to
convert. We can then see whether it's got any major problems like execution speed, poor positional accuracy, motion blur, etc..

I'm hoping that I might get a chance to run the application during the conference with those constants inserted and see whether it's complete rubbish or not.

Hopefully more later!