Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 04:19:08 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: drive by wire and buildrobot
X-UID: 162

I'd be sleeping now except too much is happening. Two big advances were 
made tonight. One is the bit banging. That is huge. It makes the sensors 
viable. The second is the main control loop. It just became clear how to 
have full time manual control simultaneously with autonomous mode. The 
same set of variables used for manual driving are just as applicable to 
autonomous mode. So long as manual inputs have precedence over the 
autonomous ones, both systems can be active at the same time. Manual 
driving is always active, even when autonomous mode is turned on.

And I can see how the path led to this solution. It was intuitive. First 
there was a drive by wire system using the piezo rate gyro. Then the 
autonomous module plugs into the very same drive by wire system used for 
manual driving. So whether it is a human controlling or a computer doing 
it, the robot vehicle does not know the difference. Drive by wire is a 
first step for autonomous field robots.

For the first time, I had a selfish impulse about this source code. It is 
becoming more sophisticated. There are some control system ideas in it 
that I've not seen in any published project (with source code - all of the 
sophisticated robots keep the code secret). But I think the answer is to 
make this a real high quality open source project. I may have to approach 
the Sourceforge people about this. I'm thinking of something like the 
"buildrobot" analogue of "buildroot" for uClibC (both are wonderful). So a 
menu/script driven configuration tool generates the robot software for 
you. I know this sounds crazy. But I believe there are common high level 
architectural patterns as well as concrete lower level design abstractions 
to large classes of robots. It is just like computers and operating 
systems. There are good conceptual building blocks. It is not hopeless.