Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

As FTC is coming up, my team and I have been discussing methods of driver assistance that we could use for it. I've been wondering, what did other teams use for driver assistance this FRC season or even in past seasons?

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

One thing I would reccommend is using LED lights. Not just because they are cool, but because you can use them along side a manipulator to assure that it's in the right position.

For example, in Cascade Effect we had a Rolling Goal latch that would hook onto the Rolling Goal to drag it behind us. The only problem was that it would only work in one orientation of the goal. It was also on the back of our robot, and the goals were on the other side of the field when we grabbed them. This made a successful latch very hard to achieve, and usually wasted time. We could have added a limit switch wired to LEDs that would light up when it was in the correct position, thus eliminating all guesswork.

My FRC team that I graduated from has used this setup for the last few years. They had limit switches on their catapult to make sure the ball was in the correct position, and limit switches in their intake to make sure the totes would stack neatly on top of each other.

I would highly recommend using LEDs and limit switches to eliminate guesswork on your drivers' behalf. I know my team has been wanting LEDs for a while now, and this is a practical way to use them.

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

While this isint exactly FTC related, in this years FRC competition, Recycle Rush, our forklift mechanism used limit switches to gauge when we had a hold of the totes, and we were able to manipulate the robot to quickly get the best hold he got with the totes. (basically we would close the forks, and if one fork hit the robot the robot would jerk slightly to a side to close the gap, making it easier on us to grab the totes and stack.) We happened to win two innovation in control awards for this, which was a happy surprise.

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

This year we added a scheme of the robot in the driver station with lights representing the switches to help during testing... We also added a BIG status light to tell if the robot is in error mode or not... Also, for the first time, we had about 10 autonomous modes... So, to help through the selection of the good mode we created an interface where we could locate each of the possible starting locations on a map of the field, an indicator of the number of points produced and a long description of each action made by the robot...

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

We haven't used this (just thought of it yesterday). Some game controllers have "rumble" vibrators. These could be used for feedback.

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

We used that and if you put more then one fonction connected to the vibration, you can't really know which triggered it... Even if you can change the power of the vibration emited...

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

This year with used PS3 controllers. The driver was notified through rumble that 10 seconds were left in the match so he would know to score the current stack. I was the operator this year, and our robots mechanisms and stacker are completely pneumatic. The operator controller rumbled when our tanks fell below 60 PSI.

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

I have to admit that making your controller rumble whenever the compressor is running makes some amount of sense...

Now we need to find a USB heat plate so the operator can check the PDP temperature during the match.

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

That's so cool.

Like others said, we also used LEDs for driver feedback. They indicated whether the stack and can were secure as well as indicating whether the robot was in automatic or manual stacking mode. We also had a gyro-assisted drive which made movements feel more precise (to me at least).

Automation always makes an operator's life easier as well. At Dallas, we basically had a shift key on the operator gamepad because he had about 2.5 layers of commands but only one of each button. By the time TRI came around he was only really pushing 5 or so buttons (3 for stacking, 2 for intake).

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

Well for us the compressor was almost always running. We had a pressure transducer trigger a rumble when PSI dropped bellow 60 more so the operator would be aware of the degradation in pneumatics performance from then on and could adjust his response accordingly.

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

We actually helped with getting the rumble stuff into the code for this year with the beta feedback. It was actually a really funny conversation. We filed a bug report to get them to add it and were told it wasn't a necessary feature to start with. The other mentor helping with the testing immediately responding and told them we needed it as a usability enhancement for our blind driver. Good times. :)

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

On our 2014 robot we used green LED's that lit up when we had enough pressure to shoot(50 psi we found out by the end of the year) and on 1023's robot this year they had green LED's that lit up I think when the tote was situated.

Also you can buy a pressure gauge reader type set up and set it to display to a labview or smartdashboard.

But for physical things on the robot, LED's that indicate things are the way to go

Re: Driver Assistance Used This Season?
 

1197 didn't bother with the whole "assist the driver" routine...

...Unless you count our habit of acquiring totes from an HP ramp, lining 'em up for a stack, and getting them stacked and ready for another tote to land underneath with minimal (if any) driver input as assistance, that is! We used an automated loading sequence, and our intake was designed to align totes for a nice easy pickup. I want to say fully automatic stacking once the driver was in position, and ideally we had a can in the top claw.