While we never could claim "KING" of the hill. We learned at regionals that if we positioned ourselves sideways to an opponent, we were an immovable force on any surface.

It wasn't the worlds most exciting strategy, but we held our ground even with us on HDPE and Wildstang on the mesh. That semifinal was incredible! If Wildstang were to get three or four more good runs at us, they may have finally nudged us off the top.

Our Auton was reliable every time. Sensors as pulse counters on the wheels: Back up out of the starting box, slight turn to face the stack, GO!. When Auton ends, start defense. Maybe you could say that we were the PITA bot (Pain in the ...)

If you are a tall robot without Auton, we'd keep you in the box for the rest of the match. If you got out we'd make it difficult for you to get to where you want to go. Sometimes that means blocking out our side, sometimes that means that we keep you over on yours.

Like I said, not very exciting, but once we figured our our strengths, it worked well.

Thanks to 65 for picking us as an alliance partner and thanks to 16 for being such a great partner, too.

Re: Which Robot Do You Think should be King Of The Hill
 

229

Lot's of questions...
1. We use two sensors placed so that their outputs are 90 degrees apart. This allows you to get accurate counting and direction info. If you bump into something or get pushed, the info is still valid and the auto mode will try to correct.
2. We do not worry about traction or loss of grip with the floor. We observed that our wheel design kept a good grip on all surfaces and the system we use (Now known as StangPS or Stang Positioning System) was able to position the robot anywhere we tell it to go within + or - 6". If auto mode was for a longer duration or over vastly different surfaces we would have to rely on other methods of determining distance traveled.
3. We are not yet employing our StangeSense current monitoring although all of the electronics are there. We are doing so well on current draw that we can easily run three or four matches on a battery. (We don't tempt fate that much though.)
4. We use an outboard processor (HC08 at 9 MHz) on the custom circuit board. It takes input from the gyro, wheel sensors, steering sensors and produces commands for the RC.
5. We have a variety of preprogrammed auto runs, 11 of which are available to be selected from the operator interface. We are also working on a Palm Pilot interface which would allow us to draw on the Palm (overlay of the playing field) where we want the robot to go and then load that into the processor. We showed some of that system in our pit at Midwest Regional via video tape.
This is geting a little involved, I will leave it up to the moderators as to whether to channel this into it's own thread. See you all in Houston.

We did not line it up backwards.
Whether you meant it or not this comment was not appreciated. You clearly have no knowledge of what happened so please don't speculate.
Allowed 16 to come back? What on earth are you talking about? 16's alliance beat us in both matches. After the first match we were down 106 to 10.

522 is a great king of the hill bot. We were paired with them during the elim's at Philly. They are a fairly small bot with a great tread style drive train and a great driver. I have seen them wedge multiple opponents off of the top of the ramp on several occasions. Great bot!!!

Re: Which Robot Do You Think should be King Of The Hill
 

Which Robot do you think should be King Of The Hill.


45 showed they were king at Chicago along w/ 292 and 245

Yeah, that wasn't too impressive was it. I'm not quite sure what the cause of that was. There were rumors that it had missed it's first waypoint and drove back to get to it. Once it was back in the starting well it tried to drive in a straight line to the top of the ramp. This would cause the wheels to slip as it pushed against the side of the ramp. Thinking that it was at the top of the ramp, it drove to what it thought was the bottom of the ramp, when in reality it ran into the bar.

We need to do some more research, but if that was the case, we have a plan to fix it.

HAVE YOUR GUYS SEEN SWAMP THING!! It's scary. That's a king of the hill robot 4sho.

team 168 will not get pushed off the hill, but other bots can also join them up to

Overall I actually thought it was rather impressive. It was neat in one of the matches (qf's I think) to see the robot be able to sweep the entire stack area and knock down all the stacks and then go up the ramp and take out the wall. Ingenious design.


I was only pointing out that no system is impervious to imperfection. That flaw pointed out that the system still has errors.

Thanks, it was fun to watch it skim across the field. When we originally designed our waypoints for that program we had the wings deployed. We changed it to not unfold until we got to the ramp waypoint. That's the reason it missed the first stack. As soon as that happened we modified our waypoints to make sure that never happens again.

As does any evolving system ... and they always seems to fail at the most critical of times.

We take a lot of pride in StangPS and are extremely careful with our field setup and human player period to ensure it gets a chance to shine. I can guarantee you that at this point in the game that setup would be double, even triple, checked.

Well, I might be biased, but I like our robot. Once our feet are down we are pretty hard to move...

Another locking bot: 330. They stayed on pretty well.

Uhh... oh yeah! 980 was good, too

This is one area where our system really paid off. We designed that program during lunch after the alliance selection using our waypoint drawing program (WildDraw). We just plotted out a course on the field that we wanted to run and loaded it into the robot controller. We didn't even need to test it out. It worked almost perfectly. (Well, it worked perfectly in the sense that it went exactly where we told it to. It missed the first stack, but that was due to not setting a waypoint close enough to the wall). Those of us on the autonomous team were excited to finally run a new program other than just up and over the ramp.

team 168 baby

out of 800+ teams only 2 were speaken very highly of and this is coming after close to 19 regionals.

any other teams u think deserve the KOH title besides 111 and 45 .