Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We plan to be hanging from the bar in around 7 seconds with blockers out! I hope. :cool:

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We do 3 things, but we can do them in different ways. Our first regional this year is buckeye and we are a little worried about weight issues. We had to make new gear boxes and they are about a pound heavier than the old ones and we are already very close on weight, so we may not be able to use our sensors. So, if we keep our sensors, we use a combination of them and our encoders to either nock the ball off, get a movable goal, or get a ball of a movable goal. If we are stuck with just encoders, we will probably just nock off the ball or just move the bot someware on the field the drivers want. If do ditch the sensors, if we have enough time left, we may just slap on a few line sensors since we already know how to do that from last year.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

What sorts of sensors will you lose?

We'll be at the Buckeye regional too. See you there! :)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We've got four switches for autonomous selection plus an LR select switch.

And our mech mentor said that we are NOT doing timing because if we crashed into a wall, the wall will lose. :yikes: Plus we got a multi-positional pnuematics system. and an arm the the engineering team said wouldn't work (it does). :evil grin: Who wants to be alliance partners?

Us too!

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

I have to stop over and see your multipositioning pneumatic arm - its something Ive wanted to do for a couple years now, but this year our arm is driven by gears and the telescoping section is extended by an E-chain that is pushed up the center.

Will come looking for you in the pits at buckeye.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We should be easy to spot- the same mentor has said we're going to be one of the first people there. Techno-Gremlins. Black/Silver, three gears w/gremlin heads on them. and a talking Gizmo ;)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

the trackers, sorry, couldent think of the name before. Its cause our guards + servo + head weigh over a pound each

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

speaking about buckeye, last year we were back to back with chief delphi in the pit.
Your display is always great to look at, and thanks for letting us barrow your pratice line mat thingy last year, it was a great help in deciding to ditch follow the line mode last year :D

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

How do you plan on doing it? Route?.....Sensors?.....Devices?

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

just got back from our first regional....slightly disappointed cuz autonomous doesn't really help a great deal this year...i think so anyways none of the teams really had auton or if they did it didn't make a difference. secondly we didn't have time to "calibrate" auton from our spare (tho totally different) robot to our competition robot because on the first day we had to make a winch :) and then we found out it cannot drive (see the thread on our revolutionary transmissions). The winch was really ghetto and didn't work. in the end we had no autonomous, we did go to the quarter finals but then our trannys had problems with backdriving as the current sensors (which also needed to be programmed THAT day) couldn't get programmed. we ended up just locking one motor down to prevent backdriving and had one motor drive, our alliance later had a battery fall out which was very sad as they may have won! but hopefully for Sillicon Vally we'll get that figured out....and btw the 10pt ball isn't worth it...to knock it down....at least with our robot! but we mgiht try and go for the bar (or get in position) during auton

it was actually our VERY interesting locking device that gave during the match! .... ;)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Team #492 has 6 autonomous modes + left/right selector. Like the original poster, we used wheel encoders to track distance and to control speed and a gyro to track angle. Using simple dead reckoning, we can peg the trigger & block the opposition in about 2-3 seconds. Because we servo the robot to the angle, the "leap" forward at the start is corrected before we get to the turning point.

Even though we could select from 6 modes, in reality only two modes got used heavily: trigger the ball & block and jam goal into opposition robot/ball chute. Other modes were to grab goal, lift 2X off and return to our player station (a bust since it is very hard to fill the small goals), cross over the field and trigger the opposite side ball (in case the opposition is very fast and plans on blocking us) and a few others.

With 5 autonomous modes programmed (left/right was simply negating the tracking angle...) and full optimization enabled, we used a little over 1/2 the code space and about 2/3 the memory (lots of I/O buffers for debug & diagnostics).

The biggest problem we had was the I/R beacons on the field totally messed up our wheel encoders! We didn't even figure it out until the morning of competition. Basically it was the only possiblity left: the robot worked perfectly off the field but always veered away from the balls on the field (and went too far). Fortunately secondary shields made from bright red cardboard (my son picked out the color) did the trick and we went on to have 100% success all the way through the finals at the Pacific Northwest Regional.

If you go to our website & view the video, you will note our robot is considerably slower than claimed, above. That is a left-over from Thursday while trying to figure out why it wasn't working on the field (we cut the speed in half) - but even at 1/2 speed we were the fastest robot on the field so we never pushed the speed back up.

http://www.titanrobotics.net

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Team #226 has just 1 auton mode right now, mainly because the programming group had about 5hrs total testing the robot. We plan to add many more selections, we choose the selections by the USERDATA byte on the OI, it works great and you can have infinite number of auton modes.

We are planning to test a copycat code for our test robot, possibly set up eeprom loader and saver programs.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Every time in UTC we just sat there and opend our big ball claw and it worked just fine for us :)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

I wonder, how many folks noticed that you can communicate with the robot via the OI prior to the match? Was that explicitely noted somewhere or did others figure this out while coding and testing?

We didn't use it, but it is obvious that one could "set" the mode (or hints) in the player station before the match starts but after placing the robot onto the field. That is a lot more fun than switching positions after getting set up :)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

I don't believe it was explicitly noted--I was looking for it! Last year, however, it was explicitly noted, and we took full advantage of it ... we'd put the robot down on the ground, and depending on our scouting info and where the other robots set up, we hit sensoroverride and then moved the joystick into one of 8 different positions (well 9, but the center was a sit still mode), then turned override off to lock in our choice. It worked pretty well ... but this year we just didn't see a need for a lot of variety in autonomous programs.