Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

Here's a question for you out there.

I was in this thread http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=56090 which is talking about auto mode. And then I asked a question that I guess I hadn't thought of before, but I'm really interested in the answers.

Has your team used an auto mode that has not been designed to score?

Maybe you didn't have the time / resouces to get the camera working. Maybe you can't hold the tube very well. Maybe maybe maybe... but you can't score in auto mode.

Do you do something else?
Open your arm?
Drive out onto the field, getting ready for play?
Drive to the other side to get in the way of the other team?
Knock over tubes on the back wall?
Etc??

Does auto mode always have to be about scoring?

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

Team 190 sets up facing the wall, drives backwards about 3 feet and gets ready to pick up the first HP toss. We deemed this more useful than spending lots of matches and time trying to score and not being in position to score when manual mode starts

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

At the moment we have several untested auto modes except for two.

One that does nothing (it works perfectly!)
And another that just drives forward for a second

We plan on having a couple more for off-season events. Maybe we'll set the arm to the ground and drive forward, face the robot towards the driver's station, drive it reverse and set the arm to the ground?

Hopefully we'll get to actually scoring in auto.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We do what I call "smack the rack" defense. We drive backwards and hit a spider foot with our ramp, back up and hit it again.

We are going to have a few more non-camera autonomous modes for Atlanta.

461 has a great mode where they clear out the ringers on the wall to make room for their massive ramps. Fun to watch.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We have a telescoping arm that begins the match tilted backwards to fit under the four foot height limit. Our autonomous drives foward, extends the arm into a vertical position and opens our claw to get ready to pick up tubes.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

During the Bayou Regional team 701 would drive towards the rack, spin a 180, raise the arm, lower the forklift, and at the end the arm would slam down to the ground to get ready to pick up ringers.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

Gee that sounds familiar - our arm 'tower' is hinged, and is tilted towards the rear at startup in order to keep our overall height under 48". In the autonomous period, we raise our arm, drive forward, and then reverse quickly. Inertia carries the arm tower forward, so that it can latch into place in a vertical position

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

This year we(166) didn't really use our auto but I do know that in past years namely last year we used a defensive auto. We drove straight. Right into a robot shooting for the three-point goal. We didn't score but neither did the other team.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We are close to completing a program that will pick up a ringer on the other side of the field.

The hope is to have the ringer ready for scoring in the first seconds of the match.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

I devised three autonomous modes:

1) Start on left side, Drive past the rack, turn right and hit anything in the way

2) Knock all of the tubes down on our wall

3) Sit there and look pretty

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We have a few autonomous modes available. They are all defensive because we can't score tubes. We can drive straight and then turn left or right depending on which side we started in order to disrupt anyone trying to place a a keeper. We don't like to use those though. There was one match at WI where we got ourselves stuck on the rack and couldn't move for the rest of the match. The auto mode do like to use is one that simply drives straight so that we are ready to play defense.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We have one autonomous routine which only deploys the arm into position to pick up a ringer from the floor. We used that one at the St. Louis Regional after one of our wheel encoders stopped working and the robot went into a mad spin instead of driving forward as it should have.

We fixed the broken wire and started running the scoring modes consistently at Boilermaker. We still have the "sit and look pretty" mode as an option in case of another encoder problem.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

The auto mode we used in Boston raised our arm to the top of the player station wall, ready to grab one from the human player. We had a tube in our possession within the first 3 seconds of the match.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We turn on our compressor to fill up the air tanks so our pneumatic grabber is ready as soon as the match starts.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We zoom back and forth to rock our arm tower into place. The arm tower starts on an angle so we can fit within four feet.

Because of the way our tower is positioned between our lifting platforms, it isn't even physically possible for us to hold onto a ring at the start of the match. The closest thing to it would be starting with the ring at the bumper, but we didn't have time to develop a more complex autonomous mode that could go forward, back up, forward again to pick up the ring, and then score.

EDIT: See John Wanninger's post above too

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

we dri 2 the other side of the field and cover goals to keep other teams from scoring

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

903 had a cool one at Detroit, they drove in a semicircle around the back side of the rack once or twice to stop other teams.

Ours for a while was just drive backwards really slowly. It was a nice setup to get the first HP ringer, but we also tried to use it once to knock into the rack (to stop the other team from scoring their keeper).

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We have 2 overall autonomous modes that don't score as well as 2 that do.
1) Drive to the other side of the rack and drive back and forth to prevent any opposing keepers
2) Sit and do nothing

We have several variations for our autonomous modes thanks to our autonomous switch.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

Yeah... we coded one, but the mentors told us not to use it, simply because they didn't trust it (they thought us having to re-tune our PID code after they changed the friction in the arm was bad coding on our part... also some other things were buggy because we didn't get all the wires hooked up correctly).

And then after 45 at BMR smashed into the rack and tipped over (a spectacular way to go I might add), they decided that they didn't want us to break it.

All our robot does is moves its arm down and closes it.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We had a programmer spend a lot of time making some autonomous modes but we never got time to test any. we ended up having our robot move the arm into position and open the claw. this let our human player place a tube into the claw right when the match started.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

Here was a pretty cool match for us. So far, I haven't seen better teamwork... but the video doesn't show it all. Even though our robot fails to move, our alliance members move up beside us and allow us to get up. Right before SkunkWorks (the other robot that was lifted) got onto the lift, they gave our robot a bump up. Sadly... it doesn't show that in the video.

So far, it's the only match for the Pacific NorthWest Regional I could find on youtube but it starts with a pretty cool autonomous period.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9rLeu0NYyU

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

537 always extends the mast, rotates 90 degrees, and brings our boom horizontal at the beginning of matches in order to be in a better position to pick up tubes from the rack. This was cool, but got cooler when we picked 494 and 70 to be on our alliance. Anyone who knows the martians know that they build two identical robots, which, for some odd and mysterious reason employed the same sort of concepts as our arm did. Essentially it looked like there was 3 of the same robot our there. Anyway, in auto the martians would unfold the arm and turn towards the chutes to pick up tubes. So, every auto mode in eliminations (we made it to semis then lost :( ) All 3 arms would deploy in perfect synchronization. There was a 537 sandwhich between 2 martians. :D . So in the first 10 seconds of the match we usually had 3 tubes up and we were coming back for more, we lost becuz we ran out of tubes and we couldnt get over to the other side to get more.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

I had fully intended to score in auton, and I still think I could, but my efforts on auton came to a screeching halt when I realized that arm control was much more complicated than I thought it was going to be. Now that I've got it under control, I am thinking about auton again.

I had it unfolding into pickup position, but my paranoid peers/mentors were convinced that it was not taking input from a limit switch...even though it worked great. That's what I'm going to test this week during a build window.

I just might have scoring in auton working; I don't forsee anything that would eat up all my build windows between now and Atlanta.

I love having a practice bot...

JBot

EDIT: Oh, and expect some good defensive autons from us...I have the framework written already; I just hadn't had enough time to test until now...

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

Our robot was spinning around in circles for its auto mode at SVR. When we realized that this only increases tread wear we decided to try and stop it. For some reason our programmers instead made the robot go forward two feet, then back up into a wall. It continued to scuff up tread, eat up current, and strain our gearboxes until our last seeding match when we finally killed the auto mode. Hopefully we'll have some sort of defensive auto at Davis.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

(ROFLMAO...) Don't talk about your programmers' work that way...I'm sure there was a completely and irrefutably logical reason the robot did what it did...:D

Like, for instance, it might be communicating with aliens. Or practicing a mating ritual with the other robots. Or it might just be there to keep your blood pressure up...but there's a reason it's messing up.

Let your programmers figure it out and be patient. They will discover their stupid mistake and they will fix it.

/gets off virtual soapbox

Common drivers...can't figure out why the robot loves kissing the wall...jeez!;)

But seriously, I still find myself staring at the robot, even when I know that I haven't changed the code one bit since the last match where it looked pretty for the first 15 seconds. These control systems...I swear they're haunted. Maybe IFI's manufacturing facility is right above an ancient burial ground or something...:D

JBot

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We have one autonomous mode with 16 different submodes and settings...
4 switches govern whether or not to defend, which way to defend, middle or low spider, and a secret mode which we have yet to use.

what is the secret mode? i guess we will find out in atlanta!

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We don't purposely not score... we had intended on scoring keepers. However, problems with no testing time led this to not happen at our regional, so we instead decided to just deploy our arm into a ground pickup position so as to do something useful in autonomous.

Working during fix it windows we've gotten our encoder drive and gyro turning working, and I believe we've figured out why our camera driving wasn't working (won't get to test until this week), so in theory things are fixed. If not we wrote our autonomous to use table driven commands, meaning we could easily navigate anywhere on the field for a starting position by simply entering "turn 90 degrees, drive 10 feet, turn 30 degrees", etc.

I'm still shooting for the "score a keeper, grab a ringer, score it too" in 15 seconds, but I'm willing to bet something will have a problem that will prevent us from getting it fully working.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We have at least two autons that I can think of:

1. Scoring auton - Pick up the keeper, acquire the light, run to it , position the keeper, slam it eloquently on the top row...

2. Non scoring auton - Pick up the keeper, acquire the light, run to it , position the keeper, hit the $@#$@#$@#$@# light...

Oh yeah, I guess there is third one that involves bouncing off big, imposing defensive ramp bots, like 48 Delphi Elite, during step 3, that one is a 50% shot...

But seriously, we initially tried to do a double auton hang with team Sparx, 1126, during the eliminations at Buckeye. We went for the top while they went for the middle. This did not end up well in the semis, as Sparx first got hung on the rack because we gave them a tap in auton and then their gripper chose to not release the keeper - bad situation in the eliminations. After that little episode, we chose to intentionally disable Sparx's auton in the finals to eliminate this potential problem. With hindsight, maybe we should have disabled ours instead, which would have eliminated our third auton mode listed above...

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

Are you allowed to do that? We were told that we couldn't do that at Florida regional.

Re: Do you purposely not score in auto mode?
 

We unfold our 10 foot tower in autonomous. Its quiet enjoyable watching a 4 foot shorty transform into a 10 foot tall behemoth :)

Actually, our robot is very perplexing to those that have never seen it in action. Either it is folded up, in which case it looks like we weren't in our right minds when designing it, since there is loose chain everywhere, and the grabber initially starts upside down. Or, when it is unfolded, everyone wonders how we plan on meeting the height requirements :p

We also have two cameras on the bot, but due to tracking issues, we haven't gotten those working with the robot yet. But hopefully with update #19, we can get something working for Davis.