[robocup-small] Re:Energy budget

[mweirich at informatik.uni-bremen.de]

Hi,

I think the problem is not to convince the teams to support the energy budget
idea. Most teams (if not all) would agree that a energy budget is a good idea
and can make games more interesting.

The problem is to find batteries that make it a "problem" for all teams 
and what
to do if a team has such low-power components so that this team does 
not have a
problem with the energy budget.
And some teams might have a problem with the additional costs of such 
components
so that they can't compete anymore.

Our robots for example (3 wheels, one of the slowest in 2005 
competition, one of
the weakest kickers) have 3200 mAh and can play a whole game without problems,
but it's only 1 game, especially for our forwards. If we have to use 1000mAh
batteries in this robots, without changing the hardware, we couldn't play a
whole game.

A virtual energy budget might be a better solution to work on, because it
doesn't have to change with the robot hardware.


Regards,
Marian Weirich
Team: B-Smart


Quoting Beng Kiat Ng <nbk at np.edu.sg>:
> Hi James!
>
> May I know what kind of power your robot's CPU is drawing relative to the
> whole robot power consumption? Is it much more than the other teams? I
> wonder if the CPU power consumption worry is overblown. If a CPU board
> draws 0.5A at 5 volts, a 8 cell 900mAh NiMh battery supply can  easily
> supply the CPU power  for 2 hours. Hence the main limitation is still the
> actuators' power consumption.
>
> Limiting batteries can introduce interesting work in SSL. A team that's not
> able to utilise the energy effectively will be penalised when it's robots'
> batteries run flat before game end. Teams can make more interesting use of
> the fresh substitution robots.
>
> Anyway, this is my last email concerning this issue. If I can't convince
> enough teams to support this idea by now, it's time to give up.
>
> Regards
> BengKiat
>
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