What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

What do you do during autonomous mode and how?
We (team 701) will drive forward extend our arm turn 90 degrees and drive back to grab the goal, the extended arm drops the 10pt ball then we drive back (w/ goal ) as far back as possible.

To do this we use IR wheel counters to measure distance and to calculate angle we use a gyro... to measure the angle of the arm we have potentiometer ....

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Our main automomous mode puts us under the drop off of the balls. We have others, however. :)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

hehe......you are already under the drop off of the balls ... .. I'm just kidding ;)
can you catch the balls during autonomous or something? and what are the others...i'm just wondering.. what people are able to do and how that is strategically

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We had two modes (our regional is over and we can't go to nationals):

1. Push our goal under opponent's ball drop off
2. Block opponent from getting to their ball-tee

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

nothing as of right now :( because we cannot figure out how to program it for dead recogning if anyone can help please contact me on aim or yahoo or msn thanks we could really use youre help please :]

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We don't think autonomous is very important this year, so the main autonomous mode we'll use is to shove the movable goal into our opponent's ball chute. We're not going for the 10 point balls. (Speaking of which, have any of you seen any teams that knock off the balls in such a way that they can still be scored?)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

we have four autonomous modes, but the one we used most was to raise our arm up a bit and use that to push the 10 point ball off and release all the balls on our side.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We rigged up our control system with four switches, so we can change our autonomous mode during the disabled period right up until the auto mode is activated, with up to 15 programs (7 one side, 8 the other, disabled) :D .

Right now we only have a few implemented:

Hit our ball, stop
Hit both balls, pull around and get in position to grab 2x ball
Hit the goal, grab the 2x ball and push towards our opponents region

We'll probably also have auto modes for blocking out their ball and doing various things with the goal.

State machines make programming these modes so darned easy! :)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We have two modes:

1) Full Forward

2) Play Dead

:D

-Rc

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We use a banner sensor to run forward until we see the center line, then we stop. This puts us in perfect postition to pick up the 2x. We plan to add to this for our next regional.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

ThomasR ... do you simply have no idea how to program it or are you having trouble with some code you have....
if its the first one.. i suggest just using a timer and drive straight forward for X time ....(line up the bot manually)
u can PM me and i can help u

btw 254: we look forward 2 seeing u at SJ (and Sac??? are u going) u have a swweeeet bot....we use it as our worst case scenario opponent :D when strategizing

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Yup, we are going to Sacramento next week. Getting anxious for some competition, though there's still so much to program on our practice bot...

And thanks for the compliment :)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Team 138's bot, Hummer II, guns full forward until the first of 4 fixed IR sensors sees the IR beacon, then lifts up the arm, turns to face the beacon, and hits the ball... nothing after that..

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We use the line following sensors to follow the line straight to the 10 point balls and knock them off. We have been able to do this very consistently and is one of the reasons we won the GM award. So far this is the only thing we are able to do, but we hope to add more modes and switches to do more during nationals.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We have 4 switches for a selection plus a left/right selector. all massless. ;) Plus a double-pull we didn't want for the dashboard jumper.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Blast! Twice as many programs as us! :cool:

Aren't you running out of program space? I just ran out yesterday...and I only have four programs implemented (they run for both sides though).

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We didn't have time to finish making/mounting/programming our tracking sensors before shipping our robot. So our autonomous modes are just using ded. reckoning, applying power to the motors for specified amounts of time. They work great in testing, and performed well in our first two qualifying matches, knocking off the bonus ball in one, and barely missing it in the next because we were actually a little too close to it. Unfortunately, we were plagued by gremlins after that. A mysteriously missing motor fuse, a disconnected PWM cable, a bit of undercarriage apparently dragging on the carpet...all conspiring in turn to keep us from going in a straight line.

We've added wheel sensors to try to compensate for any drift, and the programming was ready to test by the end of the Great Lakes Regional. A bit of work in Chicago with a black marker on our wheels and it'll be good to go.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

I pray it works...

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Our regional is over (Orlando) but our auto ended up being go straight ahead. We didn't get the IR sensors so that was out, and we couldn't quite anticipate where the other bots would be. Because of all this, we ended up driving forward next to the 10pt balls.

Btw this is my first year here at First. Can't wait to be the only programmer on 710 next year :confused:

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Already am.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We have two autonomous modes.

1) Knock the T-Ball off.
2) Push Goal



Both of our autonomous codes work, but we are going to improve upon them. It seems like alot of teams don't have an autonomous, or they dead wrec, but with little power.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

we put our right wheel on
we turn our right wheel off
we put our right wheel on
and we shake it all about!

Our auton mode heads for the 10 point ball, looking for the IR beacon with stationary sensors off to the side

and using a yaw rate sensor to hold our course steady as she goes

when we see the beacon we back up, drop our arm to the height of the 10 point ball, turn towards it 90° and move forwards at 1/3 impulse for 2 seconds

this knocks the ball off the tee, we then backup, turn 90° towards the drivers station, turn our front roller on to pick up balls in our collector

and move forwards at full speed till auton mode ends - we end up around the stationary goal

by the end of friday at our last regional our auton was getting the release ball 100%.

we havent actaully picked up any small balls from the floor (by blindly driving into them in auton mode) but the odds are sooner or later we will get at least one

but our bot is pointing towards those 18 balls scattered all over the field when the drivers take over.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Seeings how nobody else has said it yet, and I've yet to see another team attempt at it.....in autonomous, we hang (Received Hang 10 Award from Team 60 at Arizona Regional) and deploy our SODS (Shields of Doom). The SODS are lexan protection strips that lay over the bar and prevent 90% of teams from hanging on the bar. We travel up the stairs between the stationary goal and the edge of the platform and then turn around the stationary goal and center ourselves in the middle of the platform as we extend our hanging device. Then, the winch pulls us up onto the bar and our locking device locks the robot onto the bar. It took a while to perfect and our first 100% successful attempt was in Arizona during the Quarter-finals.

P.S. Oh and how we do it: Ultra-sonic sensors to detect stairs. 2 Gyros (Pitch gyro and another gyro to detect change in X), wheel encoders as we go up the stairs....yea and over 15 limit switches.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

just wondering? could you put a switch on your OI to execute your auton auto-hang algorythm at any point in the match?

Its awesome that you were able to do this all in auton 15 seconds, but what do your drivers do for the rest of the match? just stand there?

if you bot can get on the bar that quickly and reliably I would think it could also push a few small balls around, maybe run blocking interference if the other team is herding balls...

there must be something your bot can do for the other 1:45 seconds of the match, yes? is that what you normally do? or do you just go for the bar and hang there?

Im not trying to be funny or disrespectfull - what you have accomplished in auton mode is awesome - seriously

but our bot gets the release ball and herds balls to the HP - if you went head to head with us and hung on the bar for 1:45 you would loose every match - we can get more than 13 balls into the goals in that amount of time if nobody is getting in our way.

hey wait, maybe Im giving you ideas you will use against us? what regionals are you going to again? :ahh:

ok, I just checked, we are not playing in the same regionals - so I wont go back and delete my advice :^)

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Team 972's robot uses the cartesian coordinate system to plot out what the robot does. This system is very easy to reprogram in between matches

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Yea, we can do other stuff besides hanging. We have shields that we drop that protect the bar, that don't allow any other teams to hang. We can lift them individually if we wish to let our partner up however, and then we can put it back down over our partner's hanging device to not allow our opponents to hang. Also, we have an arm that can decap our opponents goal and then can go up and over the bar and cap our goal with the ball. Also, we can push against our opponents goal so that they can not get a 2X multiplier ball in it. It seemed to work quite well at our regionals, as we were semi-finalists at both the regionals we attended.
P.S. Oh yea, and we can pick up the middle ball in auton and cap our opponents stationary goal so that they can't get any small balls into it. (Well, that is if we can get that part of our auton perfected)

P.P.S. Oh yea, and we wouldn't be good for herding small balls or interference because we have an 8 wheel drive system. This might sound odd, but we have a reason for it. When we go up the stairs between the stationary goal and the edge, our outside wheels hang off the edge, and therefore the 8 wheel system is needed. Driving manually is quite difficult, although it is possible.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

Not trying to be disrespectful or mean in any way, but just to bring up a point, how well do you think you would do if we hung, protected you from hanging, and your stationary goal was capped in autonomous so that you couldn't get any balls in?

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

We just have autonomous do dead reckoning, since we had hardware issues with the sensors (too much leakage), and we spent lots of time throwing out stuff to save weight. Auto code just goes straight, since we've found it's suicide to trigger the ball drop, since the robot will be trapped by balls.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

not a problem - we have a wicked arm with a suction cup that can rip anything out of the goal if we need to

BTW we were finalists at Pittsburgh :^)

the photo below is a few weeks before we shipped - didnt have our triwheels on yet - we can hang if we want to - but you get more points by filling the goals and capping them


http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pi...&quiet=Verbose

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

fo forward... stop in front of mobile goal.. rotate arm.. grab 2x ball

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.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

It does say in the manual that your robot gets data from the OI when the robot is disabled. The only thing different between normal operation and operation just before a match is that any outputs you send from the RC are neutralized. There is still complete communication between the RC and the OI.

This year, we use 4 digital inputs as automode selectors. We can select between 15 different autonomous programs using those 4 inputs. We also use the LEDs on the OI to make sure our joysticks are calibrated before a match.

Re: What do you do during autonomous mode?
 

I did. We plan to do it that way. Plus, you can use any switch you want w/o worring about weight. :)