[robocup-small] Re: Energy budget

[Tadashi Naruse]

Hi Jim,

RoboDragons'  robots use 370ma ( 300ma for cpu board, 70ma for radio, IR 
sensors and booster for kicker) for computer system of the robot.

Tadashi

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Bruce" <bruce at andrew.cmu.edu>
To: "Beng Kiat Ng" <nbk at np.edu.sg>
Cc: <robocup-small at cc.gatech.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 6:51 PM
Subject: [robocup-small] Re: Energy budget


> Hi Beng,
>
> Beng Kiat Ng wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Well, I can tell you for at least two robots:  The CMU robots from 
> 2002-2003 used only about 100ma for computing, while UB Wingers' robots 
> use 180ma for computing.  RoboDragons' robots use a separate 7.2V AA 
> battery pack for the computer, but I don't know its consumption.  Maybe 
> Tadashi can tell us.
>
> At any rate, the consumption is small enough that it's not an issue for 
> teams that I've been directly involved with; It's more an issue for teams 
> that put lots of computational power onboard, such as Cornell and Ohio U. 
> My teams haven't taken that route mainly to save on cost and weight, but 
> on the other hand I don't think such onboard intelligence should be 
> penalized either.  It's the only way teams can experiment with local 
> vision, or significant distributed AI, for example.  If local vision is a 
> long-term goal or research area, then we shouldn't be limiting the 
> computational power.
>
>> 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.
>
> Well, what do you think of a step in that direction: Requiring a maximum 
> of 7 battery packs and 7 robots per a game, with a limit of 3 
> robot/battery substitutions.  I'd like to see how that works before taking 
> the drastic (and harder to enforce) step of requiring a specific battery. 
> Some of the issues raised by a specific battery are: What do we do with 
> teams that have CO2 powered kickers (Ohio U)?  Does that count toward the 
> energy budget or not?  Can a team charge its various capacitors before the 
> game?  How to we test that?
>
> The alternative is simply to require that all the power sources be present 
> before a game, and only 7 sets are allowed for the duration of the match 
> (we have to distinguish power sources from robots since many teams do not 
> have seven robots).
>
> Jim Bruce
> CMDragons/CMRoboDragons
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