Swarm robots/Soccer

Proposal

Hello swarm members!

We have a lady that came by looking for a cool project to show off at their shopping center. I thought of pitching her a project built on top of the swarm project team goals.

This is why I think it is interesting to accept her challenge:

   the money offered by their company can be used for development (buying components and tools)
   the goal is ambitious enough to motivate quick progress for the swarm team
   the additional money can be used to buy nice expensive tools with the leftover money (laser cutter? we're thinking of free use of the tools for people who participated in this project)
   the visibility is awesome and it motivates development of the swarm robot base.

She's offering a 50K RMB budget (half up front).

Her interest was to have something that ties in the football championship so I pitched based on that.

This would be an outline of the proposal:

2012 UEFA European Football Championship Competition: 8 June and 1 July 2012 (ETA 30 days) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Euro_2012

Four robotic teams (2 playing, 2 charging) with optional human players remotely controlling up to 7 players.

Requirements:

   Swarm behavior capable of having each team score goals into the other team goal
   NO complex electronics (no cameras, vision, RF communication, etc) - CHEAP!!!

To be built:

   Robot base with an autonomous mode and remote control (defaults to autonomous mode)
   Robot shells on top of the base
   Tiny little players shirts with numbers with colors of four different teams (each team is 7 players)
   Seven infrared controllers for robots (Forward, Backward, Left, Right)
   A table size playing table in the shape of a football field (proportionally sized to the robots)
   One special ball painted with the official ball color (Adidas Tango 12)
   Charging base

The customer will have to provide one very basically trained person watching the field at all time.

The swarm team needs to figure out if they want to take up this challenge... Lutz, Edward, Valentin have been briefed in person and are quite interested but feel it will require a LOTS of work in a very short time. If we agree, I have to send her a proposal by Monday.

from email sent 9/5/2012

Design guidelines

The original goals of the Swarm robots are still being followed. Note that the $5 per robot is the target for a basic/common robot platform. It does not include any extra features, for example it would not include cost of molding body, creating shirt, remote control, sensors to locate ball and goals etc.