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Old 04-04-2019, 12:50 PM   #1
Henchman99942
 
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Join Date: Oct 2012
Default Sensors. Logistics.

I was working on robots with sensors for a game.

I starting thinking about the difference between having one or two expensive sensors vs many smaller and cheaper ones. It occurred to me, many smaller sensors may be better, if they can converge the images and data collected to generate a composite image that allows the aberrant data to be dropped while reinforcing the legitimate data. The more sensors, the better the resolution. I think they do something like with with radio telescopes. They link together many smaller telescopes to create a virtual large telescope.

Does anyone have real world experience with this sort of thing?
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Old 04-04-2019, 02:08 PM   #2
Anthony
 
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Default Re: Sensors. Logistics.

Synthetic aperture sensors are real but on this type of scale would be treated as a single dispersed sensor, not multiple sensors. The usual reasons for multiple sensors would be field of view, redundancy, and gathering different types of information.
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Old 04-04-2019, 09:18 PM   #3
Henchman99942
 
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Default Re: Sensors. Logistics.

I was thinking of something along these lines:
http://www.chara.gsu.edu/public/basi...interferometry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astron...interferometer

The concern is to eliminate distortion from the atmosphere. But it seems like it would work for optical sensors on a robot or drone, where real world distortions - like shadows and lighting effects - could be misinterpreted. Granted, the distance between any two sensors would be small on a robot or done. But it should still have a benefit for close and medium range observations.

I just never heard of it being mentioned in any 'game' supplement.
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Old 04-04-2019, 10:53 PM   #4
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Default Re: Sensors. Logistics.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Henchman99942 View Post
The concern is to eliminate distortion from the atmosphere.
That's a different technology, and it's not a generic reduction in distortion, it's a reduction in a specific type of distortion which usually isn't a big issue at ground level (basically, it gets rid of the twinkling effect of stars, and would have similar effects on ground level twinkle where it occurs, which mostly has to do with heat haze).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Henchman99942 View Post
I just never heard of it being mentioned in any 'game' supplement.
Games mostly don't bother with the physical layout of things like sensors. Mechanically you treat the array as a single sensor.
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