Getting Better All The Time

21-13, the best score yet.  I tweaked the motion yet again.  I went back to continuous motion, for starters, since the angular was constantly starting and stopping over and over and over and over, slowing it down.  I think part of the main problem before was the message buffering.  The same thing that was happening with the LEFT LEFT LEFT stuff I talked about earlier was happening in continuous motion mode, too.  The solution here doesn’t have to be async, though, which is nice.  Instead, all I have to do is not send the same message more than once in a row.  You can tell me LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT all you want, and I only tell the robot a single LEFT and I leave it at that.  It’s now hardly ever overshooting the mark, and when it does, it can usually recover with a quick nudge back in the right direction.

Also, with this game, the robot was briefly in the lead!

So, now, why isn’t it winning?  It’s supposed to be a perfect robot, why is it still losing to a 30 year old processor?  Two big apparent reasons:

1. It’s not moving fast enough.  I need to alter it so that it will race from one side to the other when the projected point is far away.
2. It’s not going to the right place.  The trajectory projection isn’t perfect.  It’ll sometimes miss the mark.  I’ll need to go back and work on that a bit to improve the prediction.

Still, I’m very pleased with what’s come together in the last hour or so.  The day wasn’t going so well until then.  Right now, I’m at the point where I’d hoped to be by about 2 PM…  The problems today have all been little stupid ones that can only be fixed by experimentation.  There hasn’t been much problem solving, it’s all been iterative failure toward a higher goal.