The optical sensors we got had a yellow body and ... yeah I believe they had a red lens.

We took a long look at using them to lock on a goal at power up so that we could autonomously drive to the goal and lock on. Like Andrew posted, we thought we might gain a sec. or so advantage. When we checked the sensor specs against the distance from our starting position to the center-line of the field, however, the sensitivity of the sensors rolled off big-time about 4ft shy of the reflective tape. So, we'd have to start in manual, get a lock on multiple sensors and triangulate. Since we got ~12fps in high gear, we figured we'd be there by the time we got a good lock! In the end, since we were pretty fast, we relied on pure speed and a beefy front grabber, and just rammed the goal at full speed. We did end up using the optics, though, as part of a tread speed measuring circuit.

Our solution to this was to just start with the joysticks full forward. Easier, more reliable, and it didn't lock us into running headfirst if we didn't want to.

Personally I think a fully autonomous competition would be horrible (Im biased cause Im a driver) I've seen autonomous robotics competitions before. They are a difficult engineering challenge (even with tons of expensive sensors), but they are boring to watch. The part of FIRST that gets people so exicited at competition is the sport aspect. Take away the humans and its just a bunch of bots out on the feild. the human element means every match is different and unique. The robot (and people themselves) can quickly adapt to unexpected situations. THe most exciting matches are ones where everything doesnt go as planned. Who's gonna chant and cheer for an autonomous bot? The real potential would be for FIRST to give us what we need to give robots cabalities to supplement the driver.

Teleoperated robotics is what that's called. Force feedback controls would be a nice idea abeit rather complicated. It all depends on the situation for you to choose an autonomous or remotely operated robot.

That seems reasonable. You still have to live with a potentially negligible time delay between when your robot becomes live and when it gets the first joystick command. These may occur simultaneously, but, you never know.

You mean you don't want to watch a robot stuck in a corner, repeatedly executing the same failed maneuver, banging on the playing field border over and over and over and ...? Now that's entertainment!

Andrew, Team 356

Actually, the robot is receiving the joystick commands anytime the link is active, whether or not the robot is disabled. The PBASIC program is seeing the commands and everything. The reason the robot doesn't move is because there's a microprocessor in between the BASIC Stamp and the actual PWM outputs to the motor. Among other things, this processor ignores the commands from the BASIC Stamp when the robot is disabled. When the robot is enabled, the output processor allows the motors to run off of the BASIC Stamp's commands. This is the reason that people who have "ramp up" code don't see the "ramp up" effect if they start with the joysticks fully throttled: the BASIC Stamp has already gone through it's throttling up phase and already thinks the robot is running at full speed!

It is possible, however -- if desired -- to sense whether the robot is enabled (the comp_mode variable), and the robot could wait to start its accelleration ramp until it is enabled.