Finished and Completed

Well, my 3-dimensional turret program has been finished. And I've even written up an 8 page document detailing the... well, details. It's available in pdf form, and if anyone would like a copy, all you've got to do is send me an email or leave a comment on this blog.

The real question is, what should I make next?

Working

I got my turret working. Or at least, it certainly seems it is working. See here:

The x axis is the x axis from the 3d vectors and the y value are the z height of the objects. Red is an object falling straight down at some position and green is the projectile fired. It seems like what I've done worked. But it doesn't make sense to me yet why.

What I'm confused about is how I fixed my problems I've had before. I changed the z velocity of the projectile to be v*sin(theta) and when calling an update to the projectile, instead of adding the position to the equation of the height I add the velocity instead. Somehow this works, but I do want to look into the mathematics before I do this. I'll update this project one more time if it turns out that this solution is not a fluke. And then start on a new one. I'm thinking of possibly coding up Tic Tac Toe to get my feet wet in some artificial intelligence.

Math, a new plane to work on

Idea given to me by my Math friend Adam

So, as I think I mentioned, I was discussing how to do this with a friend. But until tonight I didn't have too much time to reflect on what he was telling me. He said, not exactly:  use the angle of elevation to make a connecting line between the target and the turret, then use that and the plane of the z axis to create a new axis. Since this is now a 2d problem solve it with newtons laws of motions that take gravity into effect. And kerpow.

Ok he didn't say kerpow. but I'd like to imagine that's what his brain said when it thought all of that up. He's basically a math genius. Anyway though, what I'm now encountering as a difficulty, is how to switch from my ox,oy axes to my original coordinate system. ox corresponds to the line connecting them, so it must be the magnitude of the position vector. As far as converting the y axis of my new axis back, I'm not entirely sure. Although, I have a feeling that the converstion isn't neccesary for going back, only to converting the targets coordinates into the new system. But after that, the angle of elevation + the new angle given to me by my equations should give me the 'real angle' to fire on. And that will give me my velocity vector's z component. (it's x and y are calculated by the angle the turret faces on the XY plane. Anyway, I believe, that the y component of my target will be 0 in the ox,oy axes. Because the line connects both turret and target. And if you look at the drawing above, it's abundantly clear.

now that the details are, once again, possibly worked out. Time to code!

Been a little while

It's been a while since I've updated the running blog on the status of the 3d turret. Right now, I'm still working out a few bugs. But, I should have it figured out as soon as I find the time to do it. I've been very busy with schoolwork unfortunately. Not to mention trying to read library books on computer science before I have to return them. I did think of something today which I thought was worth posting about.

A problem I was running into was that I was measuring the distance traveled by the objects by their magnitude at a given time. This, while telling me if one will get there or not, is nice, but it doesn't actually tell me the difference between the actual distances they're traveling. When the projectile is fired, it travels in an arc of sorts, but the magnitude of it's vector only tells me how far away from the turret it is. Which is not what I want, I can use that information to see if the object is in range or not, but not for the estimation and leading part.

so, this is what I came up with: I'll have a running total for the distance traveled by the objects as oppose to a straight calculation based on it's magnitude. Since this will only introduce 2 more variables, I don't think this will effect the complexity of the algorithm too much either. Which is nice.

My main mistake in not doing this first, was that I was thinking too 2D ish for this 3D problem. But now I should be able to make some more progress!

Turret 3D Estimation... still quite a work in progress

Been a bit since I've updated you guy's on my project.
Gravity has once again, proven to be the bane of my existence. Hopefully my math friend will get back to me on what he meant when we went off about some equations and such. Anyway though. I screwed up in an equation, one which I took from wikipedia, I accidently wrote a + where should have been a minus, and by the time I noticed, I had already moved and changed lines of code that I thought were wrong because of it. So yeah, it's kind of unfortunate. So, now I'm going to sit back, and think for a while on this problem.

Gosh, I wish I had noticed that + sooner...