Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

In one word.. Yes.

In more than one word. Capping a vision tetra in autonomous is a very difficult feat, and requires the electrical and mechanical systems seamlessly working together, and a of course, a bit of luck. ;)

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

This is honestly one of the most intelligent posts ever made on chiefdelphi

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

my feeling is if 5 teams nation wide cap vision tetra in the first 15 secs that would be 3 more than i expect.

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

Congratulations Elgin- if your guys accomplished it.

The next question is- can you do it consistently?

WC

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

I agree with the sentiment.

I also agree with whoever it was that says the autonomous mode should be difficult, not impossible. Judging from this thread, this certainly seems like--with the exception of a few teams--to be considered an impossible task.

Remember, that teams who are having trouble right now are not having trouble building and coding. They are having trouble completing the objective in the amount of time given, even if everything goes smoothly.

For instance, we built a robot with a long articulated arm so it could reach down and grab the tetra and keep moving. It can stack within a few seconds. It is a capable robot.

Here's something I suggest--

Try taking one of those "to scale" field drawings and plot out how long, in feet, for a team to go to pick up a tetra from any (or all) of the three beginning stations. We found that, in a best case scenario, we are left with no more than a few seconds to stack, and, given the inevitable traffic jam around the center goal, this seems unreasonable.

Again, the impracticality of the situation is not derived from the technical difficulty, but the temporal difficulty.

--Petey

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

As great as a idea it is to extend the amount of time during the autonomous period, it is way too late for FIRST to change the time. I can tell you that many programmers already have enough work with only fifteen seconds- imagine having to change four or five autonomous modes during a practice day at a competition- this is something FIRST should look at for the future, but this year it's simply out of the picture.

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

Really?

I don't see why it matters.

I mean, if you extend it to 25 seconds, then robots will be done early. That's it. You don't need to add any programming code.

And this wouldn't be that big of a change, because it would only affect some teams. A bigger change is moving ship date--think of all that encompasses, between 1600+ teams and FedEx! They did it last year, and they may do it again this year. So why not change this thing?

--Petey

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

you also have to think of the time restraints for the comps, adding an extra 25 seconds to each match could add almost an extra hour by the end of the day, the volunteers at the events are there long enough as it is.
the 15 seconds or auto is just one other challenge that we have to over come, just like the ones Dave have to over come on Mars, I bet there are many times he wishes that he could run his bots longer and can't because of restraints.
what we do in FIRST is a real engineering task, and ever task has rules and restraints that sometimes are not fair to everyone but those are the rules.:)

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

Several people have already covered the problems with this, and I think what they're basically saying is that it comes down to 2 things:

-Extending the time now hurts the teams that put in the effort up front to be able to do it. Some teams planned at the beginning of the season to cap in autonomous and designed their robot around that goal. Asking FIRST to extend the autonomous period because some teams cannot do it would be like asking FIRST to add an extra foot to the size of the box we start in because some teams wanted to make an arm that wouldn't fit in the 5 foot box. A great part of the FIRST challenge is working within the restrictions, rules, and bounds given. They do this for a reason: real engineering is the exact same way. Real engineers have rules (FAA, FCC, OSHA, UL, DOT, etc. provide them) and restrictions (product X cannot cost more than $Y to produce, and must be finished within Z months to meet customer needs) that they need to work with on a daily basis too.

-From a logistical perspective, extending autonomous means the matches take longer, which means it's harder to squeeze in as many matches. Most teams want more matches to make the investment in their robot pay off a little better and to make the competition more exciting.

I'll add my own point:
-If most teams already aren't able to cap in autonomous, then how many more teams will be able to do it with an extra 10 seconds at this point in the season? Not many, I suspect. Which means that now instead of rounds with 15 seconds of not much interesting going on you now have half a minute! That can and will make the game seem more boring to spectators who don't appreciate how hard autonomous mode is (or don't even realize what autonomous mode is).

How about a different question: would you be willing to give up 10 seconds of driver control to add to the autonomous mode, so that the rounds stay the same length? I bet most teams would say "no" because they know they can be more productive in driver-control mode.

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

Dave,
This is my rookie year in FIRST so my perspective on this issue is certainly limited.
Shouldn't the question be something like what is FIRST trying to accomplish with the autonomous period? Is FIRST trying to separate "super-teams" from
"regular teams"? IF so, then adding autonomous mode seems a simple way
to do this.
Is FIRST attempting to emphasize the programming/algorithm
aspect of the competition? At General Motors, the algorithm portion of embedded microprocessor controls is so important we consider it key Intellectual Property and even sell it to competitors. Is FIRST trying to move the competition from a "battle bot" mentality to a "program bot" mentality?
I imagine that NASA robots on Mars are probably operating more in the "program bot" mode that the joystick controlled "battle bot" mode.

I am excited about attending my first FIRST competition in St Louis on
March 10 and may be able to answer my own questions about this manner
after that experience. I look forward to reading about this subject in further posts.

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

I FULLY disagree with that. I wrote 95% of the code to our robot. This includes autonomous. When I was having trouble capping the tetra, my mentor helped me (hence the other 5%). I still learned what he did and how he did it. That's what FIRST is about, learning how to do something you couldn't do before.

Wayne C. : We can consistenly get the vision tetra. About 3/5 times we can drive towards the goal, and about 2/5 times we can cap it.

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

I'm beginning to regret the fact that our team didn't take the risk to use the camera....I don't think FIRST would've decided to include it in our kits this year if it were impossible to use. After build season I'd encourage teams to get their hands on it to see just how tough of a challenge it'll be to get it working. I don't know, I've just got this guilty feeling that many people will be surprised...

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

That's our secret. :)

Eh, not that it matters now. But, sort of? I don't know how to answer this question, since most of the time, the darn robot was picking up the tetra, and then dropping it on the floor, because it saw the beige color of the floor as yellow, and we had a heck of a time blocking any color similar to yellow. But, when the actual fied is there, it will be only a matter of tweaking the robot per the field. So, yes.. in theory, it will be consistent. Right now, there are just a lot of variables in play. But, we can do it, and will probably be working on perfecting that up until the deadline when we ship it Tomorrow.

Good luck to everyone who tries it. :)

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

Ok, sorry, no offense was intended, I was just trying to get my point across. Additionally, while I am impressed that you are able to cap the tetra at all, dont you think that 2 time out of 5 under practice conditions is an awfully low rate? IMHO autonomous mode should not be about a few teams having an excellent program, an excellent robot, and still having to get lucky, it should be about many teams programmers having a chance to express themselves (programming is an art after all) and learn not only to program better, but to better communicate with their build team in the process, then when they do well at all of these tasks they should be able to with reasonable consistency see their efforts produce. While admittedly the camera is difficult to work with I think most of the problems with it could be overcome given more time. I know this is the case with the program I am working on.


Here too I must respectfully disagree. Asking FIRST to extend the autonomousperiod because some teams cannot do it would be like if FIRST asked teams to build a robot that must fit in a shoebox, and must be able to score tetras on the center goal and some teams wanted to build a bigger robot.

While that may be a slight exaggeration really I am not sure it is. I would bet that if given that challenge there would be a few teams that would come through, while most would fail, not due to their incompetence, but rather due to the unreasonable restrictions on the size of the robot.

Also in repsonse to your question whether we would give up ten seconds of drive time for ten seconds of autonomous mode: Yes I would love to do that. For one thing how many teams could score three tetras in the first ten seconds of drive time? Additionally if the ten seconds are being switched from autonomous to drive time for all of the teams then it shouldnt affect the drive strategy at all unless you have it planned out based on a two minute drive period. And last I feel that FIRST should not be about having a productive drive time, it should be about learning and personally I feel that autonomous period better promotes learning.

Note that nowhere in there is any disrespect intended, these are simply my feelings about the issue.

Re: Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?
 

i also fully agree, we are a nonsponsored team out of alton new hampshire, last year we were able to pull the 10 pt ball back into the playing field. Also this year we are able to navigate to a tetra in about six or seven seconds, leaving nine to get to the middle goal which takes roughly the same time. There is so much information online about programming, it is only a matter of time to understand how to.