Sumo Lab

Purpose

The purpose of this lab is to give you an idea of what the Kalman Filter does and under what conditions it works well. We will experiment with KF by building Lego Mindstorms Sumobots. This is in the spirit of http://mindstorms.lego.com/specialevent/WhatisLEGOSumo.aspx, with some obvious differences (I am not going to build your robots from scratch, for example).

Description

In this lab, your goal is to build a robot that acts like a sumo wrestler.  Your goal is to find defeat your opponent robot by either flipping the robot over or pushing it out of the ring.  Your challenge is to apply the Kalman Filter to noisy sensor readings, which will allow your robot to try to predict where the opponent robot will be.

The ring is a four-foot diameter circle painted black with white edges.  Competition against an opponent will consist of three 1-minute rounds.  The tournament will be round-robin, so each robot competes against all other opponents.  If there is no clear winner in a given round, the instructor will decide the winner.

There are quite a number of sites describing Lego Sumo robots.  You are welcome to use any resources, borrow designs and code, as long as you cite your sources in your lab writeup, and meet the following qualifications:
  1. You must use parts in your kits, but you may also borrow parts from my "spares", as long as they get returned.
  2. You must use Lejos.
  3. You must use the Kalman Filter in your algorithm.
  4. If you make use of someone else's design or code from the web, get their permission, and tell them what we are doing.