Re: Innovative Controls
 

Team 1504, The Desperate Penguins, won two Innovation in Control Awards this year (at the Kettering and Grand Blanc District Events) for their "Space Drive" control scheme. I don't remember the specifics, but it had a whole bunch of cool features, including robot orientation-independent movement.

Re: Innovative Controls
 

Thanks for the compliment. Me and my controls captain built it. We designed to to be a voodoo doll as you said. The voodoo doll controls the mechanism portion of the robot IE the shooter arm and everything attached to it. Pictures of the voodoo doll are attached below.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6AB...it?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6AB...it?usp=sharing

Re: Innovative Controls
 

I'm the Controls sub team Captain for 1111 Powerhawks, and yes; our controls board does act like a voodoo doll. We call it "Voodoo bot", or machinula: little bot in Latin. The base and aesthetic wheels are ABS plastic printed in a 3-D printer. The structural parts are made of leftover bits of black 80-20, and miscellaneous scrap and FTC metal. Also, plexiglas (or equivalent) makes up the switchboard on the base, and the handle for the shooter arm controller is a piece of PVC.
The arm is on an axle that turns sprockets on a chain that are hooked up to a 16-bit rotary switch, to control the up and down movement of the robot's shooter assembly. There are "firing buttons" at the handle end of the controller to index frisbees into the shooter, and any other switches (shooter on/off, shooter speed, autonomous selector, frisbee indexer de-jamb, arm position indicators, and any other operator control.)

The innards house the wiring, cypress unit, battery for back lights (bright blue LEDs to light up switchboard) and any other breakaway mini-boards for any of the controls. The Voodoo bot works directly with the laptop and what it does, the robot mirrors. Real Steel style.

Re: Innovative Controls
 

We used a series of potentiometers in 2011 to mimic our arm. Not very practical in a match, but it made programming arm positions easy. We won an award for it and also our control board.

Here is a picture.

Re: Innovative Controls
 

This year we implemented point-click, fully automatic, and manual targeting into our pan+tilt shooter. We also used encoder based (p-loop) drivetrain brakes, and an rpm-based rapid fire mode for our shooter.

Re: Innovative Controls
 

I don't know if I have the team correct, but 2349 Hurriquake used a tablet to control their bot and act as the drivers' station. The won innovation in control at the Boston Regional this year. Hopefully someone on their team sees this and either corrects me or expands on this.

Re: Innovative Controls
 

These are all really cool methods of control! Really great stuff guys! Keep it coming, and get as technical as you want! :D

Re: Innovative Controls
 

We're (I'm) working on a custom dashboard in which you draw a path on a scale field and have the robot traverse it. It's sort of like the recording/replaying autonomous, for which I have code, in case someone wants to improve it. It's C++, and horribly written (by me :P ).

Re: Innovative Controls
 

I cannot overstate this enough: if you have a skid-steering robot and have not tried using one of these controllers yet, then you are putting a large handicap on the learning curve of your driver.

One of the better control approaches we've used for such a drivetrain is having the steering wheel position set a target setpoint for the rate of rotation of the drivetrain, so if you turn the wheel a given amount the robot will try to turn at X degrees/second (using gyro feedback). This has the nice advantage of eliminating rotation overshoot, since as soon as you let go of the wheel the robot tries to stop spinning by itself.