Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

Is Autonomous worth it? Absolutely. Stacking 3 yellow totes and moving them into the auto zone and not touching them is a very very hard task. Only a few teams will be able to do it and they will expend allot of resources to do it. We are not putting resources into doing it. A much simpler and very doable autonomous strategy is to have all three alliance members push the tote and can into the auto zone. This is not hard. It can be as simple as putting a 40 to 45" 2x3 or 2 x 4 on the back or front of the robot around 8" off the floor. A piece about 8" sticking out from the left side helps with the can. Encoders are needed to measure distance the robot travels and the robot needs to go straight. With a little practice, the speed and distance can be dialed in and the tote, can and robot be placed in the auto zone. 18 points for a little effort. But all alliance members must do it. All or nothing. Our team may bring a setup to the comp to assist our alliance members with this. Our programers need to be ready to help lesser teams accomplish this. It's really not that hard. 18 point is 18 points. At a district 18 points x 12 matches is not an insignificant addition to your score.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

Sounds easy....but it might not be quite that easy, if you also want your robot to be able to play the rest of the game. That 45" wide piece of wood would certainly get in the way of our manipulators, and probably knock over some stacks when driving around, if we were able to make stacks with it in place.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

The time it takes to program the autonomous code, will all be worth it. One game can be decided by one point. You will always miss the shot you don't take. Rather than limiting yourself week 3, you should program something at least. Then in the competition you will always have the option of getting those points without relaying on others.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

Hmmmm... That is exactly what I say every season, "This or that can't possibly be accomplished by a team until Einstein" And, invariably I am proved wrong. In fact, one of my favorite things to look forward to during the initial weeks of the competitions is to see who will be the first to do "the seemingly impossible".

That being said, we shoot for that impossible task and the degree to which we fall short (and we always do, so far) is how we rate our progress towards developing a better robot than the year before.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

There won't be many games that are "decided" at all this year. In fact, I would be quite happy with my team if we lose a match this year. ;)

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

Wow! I was thinking the exact thing when I read about grabbing all three RC's at the same time.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

The alliance on the opposite side of the field is not your opponent. You don't beat them. You and 2 other teams play for your selves. How many points can you get this match? If a team can do a 3 tote stack 3 out of 10 or 4 out of 12 of the time and another team works with their partners each match and get 3 tote, 3 robots and 3 cans in the auto zone every time, who is ahead.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

Right, I forgot that there is no winning matches. Well I am willing to bet many teams will be undefeated this year. ;)

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

Actually, a maximum of three matches can be decided by one point: everything else is averages.

But since we're talking averages, let's discuss.

Last year's Palmetto Regional saw teams play nine qualification rounds. You get one more tote in teleop in one match (so, +2), and your average score increases by 2/9=.22. By the same math, that 20-point autonomous stack? 2.22 points to your average if you pull it off once.

In the quarterfinals, where you only get two matches? 2/2=1.00, 20/2=10.00.

If you're not scoring at least the robot set in autonomous, you'd better be lining up something pretty freakin' sweet for teleop.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

Your completely right, the teams that can do a auto consistently, will have a large advantage over others in terms of ranking. Autonomous is always worth the time during build.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

Autonomous is definitely worth it. Since qualifying is directly based off of points now, those 20 points mean a lot. Vision tracking, however, is a different story. From what I've seen, I don't see the point in tracking onto the yellow tote when you can just start in a pre-defined position (you can use measuring tools to position your robot now) and have a much fancier autonomous without having to spend a large amount of time writing vision processing code.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

You are making me want to take a trip to Alamo just to see this.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

I'm imagining you plan to not need partners in autonomous, or are grabbing all the step containers at once.

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

That dimension fits right in with the distance the containers are apart from each other.

Whelp that's one ambiguous comment solved...

Re: Is Autonomous worth it?
 

A million times yes.
Doing the math (which I won't bother to bore any of you here with), you will quickly figure out that AUTO greatly helps.
Think about it logically as well, the more points you score, the higher your average will be, correct? Wouldn't you want a high average?

I think at the least teams should be going for a robot set. Even if the programming on the team isn't strong, I'm sure they can have the wheels spin for a set amount of time to move into the AUTO zone.