2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I'm sort of disappointed that the autonomous phase was cut to only 10 seconds this year. Finally, we get a processor that's reasonably capable, we've had a couple of years to develop some experience with the PIC processors, and instead of increasing the time so we can really show off, we get our time cut. Programming the autonomous phase is one of the more difficult and time consuming parts of robot development, I think cutting back the time seems to denegrate its importance. I was hoping for at least 20 seconds if not 30. :mad:

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I am also extremely disappointed. :mad:

Don't get me wrong; this year's game looks to be quite interesting, but I do wish there were more autonomous objectives and a longer time.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

You two should listen to the lastest FIRSTpodcast #5, it talks about this in a way you might of not considered. auton being shorten for a good reason and how its way more important than ever.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Auton being shortened gives all of the coders out there MORE time to show of. Score 40 (30+10) points every match :).

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

The shortening is not terrible. Yes, we have 5 seconds less than last year, but you start right in the middle of the field, which means it will take you less time to get anywhere in the middle of the field than it would if you were starting at your end of the field. As another effect of the middle starting, there are more defensive opportunities (you start closer to your opponents) for autonomous than in the past. There is also no need to have a large moving arm that takes more time to move than a shooter could take to get up to speed/loaded, and the balls can be fired more rapidly than tetras could be placed on goals (so more scoring opportunity). Lastly, it adds a new challenge; will you have enough time to shoot all 10 balls if you spend x amount of time finding or reaching your target?

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

The shortening was deliberate. This year it is very important to pick up as many points as possible this year because the team that wins will get two back to back periods of continuous offense. If FIRST were to leave the autonomous operation period any longer it would make the process of scoring a large amount of points that much easier.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I think it makes auton much much harder. Scoring 10 balls in 10 seconds will be some feat. Especially with defensive robots all around.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I'd guess that since autonomous was introduced in 2003, less than 10% of the teams I've seen used more than 10 seconds worth of the autonomous period. In fact, in many cases the real autonomous action was over in 5 seconds or so. Think of the wall of bins in 2003, or knocking the ball off the tee in 2004, or dropping the hanging tetra in 2005. In the vast majority of matches that I've watched, the last 7-10 seconds of autonomous had nothing going on, and really I felt this took away some of the excitement of the game. Perhaps FIRST has observed the same thing as me and shortened autonomous to a) make the matches more exciting and b) shorten the length of a match in hopes of being able to run more matches.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

If you compare the clock / instruction cycle period of a microprocessor to a human heart beat, one second to a µP running at 1MHz is like 11.6 hrs.

The faster a processor is running, the more it can do in a shorter period of time. Ten seconds to your robot is like 116 hours to your human player (the amount of time it would take a human to do the same number of instructions or calculations)

A well designed robot should be able to acquire the upper target, get within range, and fire 10 balls, all within 5 seconds or less.

So what will it do with its remaining 5 seconds (58 hours in robot-time) ?

(the hokey pokey would be impressive :^)

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

If I'm not mistaken, we really have as much as 90 sec. for Autonomous. (Well OK, 10 Autonomous + 2 40 sec. "hybrid" periods). I know, you think I'm off my nut. Fine, but think about it. There is no way you can track the upper target manually with any real success! You have to have it done by sensors and processor all the time while on offence. Add to that the initial 10 sec. fully autonomous, and you have a real programming challenge.
Besides, 10 sec. to gain a serious point advantage is one heck of a challenge.

My suggestion, don't look at it as a disappointment, look at it as a real challenge to you as a programmer to make maximum points in minimum time.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Hi,
Coding your bot to drive and shoot in 10 seconds is really challenging...especially if you want to shoot at 100% (10 of 10 balls). This is far more difficult than raising a tetra and sitting it on the center goal like we did a few times last year in autonomous.

Consider this aspect...Software assist during the 120 second drive time. Example:
1. Laptop computer with graphic display connected to Dashboard serial port.
2. Camera x,y data being used to move cross-hairs on laptop.
3. Gunner (human) uses the crosshairs on laptop display to move turrent azimuth and elevation to close proximity. 1 or 2 tracer rounds to allow human to get to the target...and then feed the balls into the target. One team is allowing for loading of over 25 balls.
4. Drive team can be in opposing corner from the robot shooting diagonally while the bot is moving.

Squeezing the most useful information from the sensors with good code is much more challenging this year. Add in X,Y sensors with Yaw rate sensor to dead-reckon is cool.

So, think of a 130 second autonomous mode with driver assist for 120 seconds. :-)

Regards,
ChuckB

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

That's how FIRST works. Just when they start to make things easier, they do something to make it harder. They give us all this great stuff in the kit and we could do all these wonderful things to show off the talent of our team - and then they give us restraints such as weight, size, and time. There is never enough time to do everything you want to do in FIRST.

Eric

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Hint to the teams: If the green light is within the field of view of the camera at the start of autonomous period, the camera can acquire, track and lock onto the target in a second or less. If you move your robot during autonomous period, don't go faster than than the camera can track (which is pretty fast).

-Kevin

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

How fast can the camera track. Do i need to write some code to make it be able to track better. I havent yet set up the camera so i dont know how fats it really reacts.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

How many matches last year that were over in less than 10 seconds.

I feel that auton is critical this year, teams could win or lose a match within 10 seconds. Much more fun for us programmers.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I agree with both quotes. This year if your robot can't score in the center goal during autonomous I suspect your drivers won't have much luck scoring in there either. I imagine it will be extremely difficult for a driver to line up and score into the center goal. In fact, the best center goal scoring robots will have their ball shooting mechanism running autonomously during the whole match. This makes the software teams job this year extremely important and fun!

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

You're free to modify/re-write the code any way you see fit. The camera, out of the box, tracks pretty well and can potentially be made faster by adjusting the two proportional gain values that are documented in tracking.h. You might also consider adding some more intelligence to the tracking algorithm. As an example, consider implementing some kind of forward predictor of where the center of the green blob (also known as the centroid) will be in the next t-packet and move the servos ahead of time. If the centroid moves 30 pixels to the left between the last t-packet and the current t-packet, it might be safe to assume that the centroid will move around 30 pixels left in the next frame. With that knowledge, command the servos such that the camera will move, say, half that distance left so that the calculated error on the next t-packet will be much smaller. If you don't understand this, don't worry as it's advanced stuff you'll get later in college if you take a control theory class.

-Kevin

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I know exactly what you mean and I am working on ways to make it faster. Also rewriting the search code to make it find the target faster.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

You're thinking exactly the same thing I am. This year, programing your robot will be extremely important as well as the use of the CMU Cam. Your robot will more or less run its own "autonomous mode" to score in the center goal becuase it will be eatremely hard to line it up and stay lined up with all of the pushing and shoving I suspect will be occuring in the matches. Without an automatic aim, it is unlikely that you will have an easy time scoring into the center goal. However, I'm sure that some teams will be able to do it, just not as well as anyone else who tries to manually score.

...my $0.02 on the game...

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

This is exactly something I envisioned. The dashboard program can be utilized even further to more autonomous functions into the human mode.

Last year, we had buttons for predetermined arm positions such as 'short goal w. one tetra', 'center goal w. one tetra', and 'fully stowed'.

This year I can see utilizing the camera or a combination of sensors to use a point and shoot dashboard type interface. Line up the crosshairs and fire.

An alternative might be instead of using the camera targeting, use predetermined field positions and different modes of shooting to line up the crosshairs?

I think that this autonomous leaves quite a bit to the imagination and also forces programmers to start thinking about more code in the human mode.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

The holy grail: Your board has one switch, "Fire".

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Actually, I forsee two: Fire and "Thats the opponents target, you dumb robot"

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

...so that's what we can make the big red button do.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Computers make fast and accurate mistakes, as always, PEBKAC applies here!

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Just because Auton mode is shortened That doesn't mean you can't have a task done autonomously in the other 2 minutes

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

What would be really impressive is if your team didnt need any drivers. The robot could acquire the target, shoot, and move all on its own. Then at the end of 120 seconds, it tries to get back to the platform. That would be very cool to watch.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

That would be cool, except for the part where it tries to fire the balls it doesn't have, because it's already fired the 10 balls it started with.

And it's no where near impossible to hit the center goal without using the camera at all. The camera is a very good assistance and increases your accuracy humongously; but you can calculate that your robot could hit the goal if it's between x distance and x distance, estimate that distance during the match using field features (and knowing their distance from the goal), and try to line it up so the ball will land in the goal. Alot more room for you to miss, but still possible.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

90 seconds in autonomus? Psssh. Lame! Our driver will just try to amuse the crowd while the robot does it's thing... :D

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

That's why you should have sensors to count the balls going in and out of your hopper. FIRST provided some... if you know where to look.

Furthermore, human beings really suck at this sort of thing. I predict no human driver will get an accuracy of above 30% when being harassed by a defensive robot at multiple ranges.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

We're already intending on using this sensor, I was just commenting a completely autonomous robot would have great difficulty finding balls to pick up off the floor, and I wouldn't want to rely on my human players trying to throw them in the robot.

If you lower the angle enough (somewhere in the range of 25 to 40 degrees) and fire the ball with the right velocity, you can get it so the ball "peaks" at a height that would still go in. If you make this height very close to the top and do a shallow angle that allows the ball to maintain a height near that for a good lenght of time, you can get a wide range to shoot with (shooting 10 m/s at 32 degrees if your ball leaves your launcher at 54" allows you to hit the goal anywhere from 6 feet to 24 feet away without readjusting, not including air resistance).

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Even greater than the holy grail: Your robot has one button, Win.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I think less time is better really. It makes teams have to perfect and work harder to make sure it works right.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Actually, I was toying with the idea of doing something like that; i would have a turret continuously track the target so the driver can just hit a fire button to shoot them into the goal wherever he is on the field (assuming he's in range). Of course, it wouldn't be quite the holy grail, it would the holy grail plus two joysticks, and a switch to pick up balls.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Exactly.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

And everyone would have the opportunity to score some points during autonomous. There would be a wider range of scores during autonomous. And it would me that teams OTHER than the top teams could hope to score meaningfully.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Granted in the games of the past and Stack Attack was with the old BASIC Stamp processor. But have you run the numbers for this game? At 12 M/sec from any reasonable distance, the balls are in the air for a good fraction of a second. If you're a team that doesn't have a strong autonomous, it takes a few seconds to just get to the center of the field and line up.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I was specifically thinking of the actual autonomous phase vs the other control aspects of the robot during the teleoperation phase.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Two separate issues. If you don't walk away with the 10 point autonomy bonus, the rest is just robot control.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I've seen your drivers. They're not that amusing. :D

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Our team wants a fire button as well, I suggested giving the shooter operator joysticks "just in case" the camera stops working or something weird. I think might put on a switch to toggle between auto fire (firing using the camera to aim) and manual fire (just giving control to the shooter operator), that way if the camera is pointed at the wrong goal or we're on defense and want to save energy by not having the turret move, we can just set it to manual.

Oh, lastly, we'd like one big Easy button right in the middle between the 2 drivers. Must light up, must be big and red.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Our team wants to have one switch: don't fire.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

i am mad that aucton is cut to 10 seconds but challenges are good.
it is still Enough to make a ball in the top goal.
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Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

only one button? "Launch" or "shoot" would be good.

"Fire" on a robot is usually a bad thing - or do you mean to trigger the Halon system?

BTW: over the years I have seen robots catch fire during a match. Sometimes a motor does a pyrotechnic show billowing smoke. A few times wires have shorted and circuit breakers where not where they should be and stuff caught fire.

If this happens quickly look in the bleachers. You can actually see all the team scouts, crossing that team number off their list of potential alliance partners :^)

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Why do we need a button? The joysticks have triggers, right? :D

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Because pushing a big red button is classic.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Now, I have a question.

We're a rookie team this year and we probably won't use the camera as our programmers are very green and a launching mechanism is beyond the scope of our mechanical team. What are other options for the autonomous period? I have heard suggestions about a spiraling drive pattern, just to bump into other bots to screw them up. Would that be effective? or would the bumpings be inconsequential?

Thanks

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

As far as the camera goes, it's quite possible they could get it working.. out of the box the code will search for and lock onto a target :)

If you drive around randomly in auto. with the intent of running into other robots, I would worry about damage to your robot or someone elses. (Although we had our robot run full speed across the field last year, and right into the other wall) But I don't think driving around like that would do much..

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Well I know that there are specific rules about ramming, but as far as the robot goes, I think we are pretty sure that we are going to ignore the top goals and just go for the sides. However, we aren't looking at a "garbage-can-dump-bot" like in the game animation, so the auton period seems useless to us.

Basically we decided to learn the CMU cam during the off season and get familiar with it to prepare for next year's competition.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

the problem with just driving around is you may drive into your own alliance partner, who is trying to score ten balls in the center goal.

If nothing else, try for a dead reckoning approach to blocking your opponents goal, ie: drive forward two seconds, turn left for 1/2 second, drive forward for 2 seconds - see where your robot ends up, then tweak the timing to get the robot more or less where you want it on the field. then have it just sit there

or you could take the same approach and try to score one or two balls in the side goals. Even one point can be the difference between winning auton mode, if your alliance partners can score points as well

who knows, you might have matches in which none of your opponents can score any points in auton. Then one point would be all you need!

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Every team needs to start from somewhere, if it's the bottom rankings than you have to work your way up. We were all rookies at some point and the only way to get better is to take on the challenging.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Just to clarify, dead reckoning is not the practice of turning on a motor for a given time. That is just a pre-timed sequence.

Dead reckoning is using sensors on your robot to figure out its speed and direction and integrating to maintain an approximate location and heading. This is a widely misused term in FIRST... I'm not sure why. :confused:

See wikipedia.

Cheers!
-Joe

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

I was under the impression dead reckoning was running without feedback, such as sensors, and just blindly driving, whether based on timers or loop counts or just setting your motors to a wide turn and leaving it.

"dead reckoning
n 1: an estimate based on little or no information [syn: guess,
guesswork, guessing, shot]
2: navigation without the aid of celestial observations"

http://dict.die.net/dead%20reckoning/ google turned this up, not sure of the validity, so I'm not really sure. Anybody have any other sources?

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Many of the LEGO Mindstorms books I have read refer to rotation sensors/encoders as a form of dead reckoning. The way I would define it would be anything which is based off of assumptions on how you started. (IE, you have to be in a certain spot and track yourself the entire time.) Basically, "I reckin' I'm right about thar."

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Alright then, I suppose that is the correct definition, but I still think dead reckoning can include running "blind" (Without sensors) its still assumption based.

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

dead reckoning: any mode of navigation in which you are likely to end up dead :^)

the real defining difference is navigation with no outside references. Looking at your speedometer and driving for 30mph for 5 minutes, or running a boat engine as fast as it can go for 10 minutes, then turning left, going for 5 minutes...

if you use a compass, or GPS, or sensors that detect outside waypoints (lighthouses for example, or light beacons....) then you are not dead reckoning.

Even the use of a compass is in between, because it can tell you direction, but not distance - so with a compass you only know which way your are pointing, not where you are (and not really which way you are moving, because a compass in water cannot indicate the effects of current, wind and tides).

Im not sure that having feedback sensors on your wheels, or using a timer (counting clock pulses) makes a difference. Your wheels can slip, the tires can wear, another robot could be pushing you backwards while your wheels are spinning forwards, so I dont see how a wheel sensor is any more accurate or reliable than going by applied motor power and timer clicks?

Re: 2006 Autonomous Disappointment
 

Well, Look on the bright side, you can program the robot and have it go streight, with any luck it might even be able to soot in the hoop, :) ah heck, what am i thinking, thats bull only giving us 10 seconds, :mad: and my freind says hi, an you can use the autonomous mode next year :cool: .