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Interface EDU.gatech.cc.is.abstractrobot.SealedSphere

public interface SealedSphere
extends SimpleInterface, KinSensor
Provides an abstract interface to the simulated hardware of a 5cm spherical robot. If you write a control system using this interface to the hardware, you can test it in simulation and (maybe someday) on mobile robots.

Sensors and Actuators
SealedSphere robots can sense their position, the locations of teammates, opponents, obstacles and attractors. The robots can turn and drive.

Frames of reference
We use a standard cartesian coordinate system in meters and radians. Pretend you are looking down on a robot: +x goes out to your right (East), +y goes up (North). The center of the world is (0,0). When the robot is initialized, it is facing east. Headings are given in radians, with East=0, North=PI/2 and so on counter-clockwise around to 2*PI. Some methods return "egocentric" vectors. An egocentric vector is given relative to the center of the robot in the same heading reference frame as global coordinates. An object one meter east of the robot is at (1,0) egocentrically.

Implementations
This class is extended by a simulation class (SealedSphereSim) The subclass handles details of interaction with the simulated world. Potentially, in the future, another implementation will extend this class for actual physical spherical robots.

Timestamps
Many of the sensor and motor command methods (e.g. get* and set*) require a timestamp as a parameter. This is to help reduce redundant computations for the same movement step. When real robots are used, this becomes especially important because I/O to sensors is expensive in time.

If the timestamp is less than or equal to the value sent on the last call to one of these methods, old data is returned. If the timestamp is greater than the last timestamp (or -1), the robot (simulated or real) is queried, and new data is returned. The idea is that during each control cycle the higher level software will increment the timestamp and use it for all calls to these methods.

Copyright (c)1997, 1998 Tucker Balch

Version:
$Revision: 1.2 $
Author:
Tucker Balch

Variable Index

 o MAX_STEER
Max turning rate of a SealedSphere robot.
 o MAX_TRANSLATION
Max speed of a SealedSphere robot.
 o RADIUS
Radius of a SealedSphere robot.

Variables

 o MAX_TRANSLATION
 public static final double MAX_TRANSLATION
Max speed of a SealedSphere robot.

 o MAX_STEER
 public static final double MAX_STEER
Max turning rate of a SealedSphere robot.

 o RADIUS
 public static final double RADIUS
Radius of a SealedSphere robot.


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