Re: Best Autonomous
 

Thanks for the compliment! We won the Creativity Award in Orlando, the Controls award at Palmetto, and the Championship Controls award in Atlanta, so I think the judges agreed with you.

The EASY button on the front of TyRap VII made the retry possible. When it contacted the spider foot, the automatic scoring sequence was engaged and the robot KNEW it had made it. If it didn't hit within a reasonable time period or a maximum camera tilt, it would back away from the rack and try again.

On Archimedes we only missed 1 out of our 14 matches (92.85%), and that was the first one. We nailed the remainder of our qualifiers and EVERY SINGLE ONE of our eliminations (Quarter, Semi, and Finals) and ended up Finalists on Archimedes along with 85 and 107.

If you have a BitTorrent client (http://www.BitTornado.com or http://www.BitTorrent.com), feel free to come over to my tracker at http://ldeffenb.dnsalias.net:30049 The videos you'll want are:

2007 UCF Jim 386 WMVs
2007 UCF SOAP 386 WMVs
2007 Palmetto 386 WMVs
2007 Atlanta WMVs

Those have all of our matches in small space and correspondingly low quality. if there's any that you want to see better, pull the .mpg version of that match.

For a great view of the retry, pull 2007 Palmetto Q29.mpg. For our reverse autonomous scoring attempt, check out 2007 UCF Jim 386 Q49. And for a spectacular crash as we attempted a retry for outside scoring, check out 2007 Palmetto Q40.mpg.

Enjoy! If all goes well I'll be compiling a video of all of our autonomous executions labeled with where and when, but I haven't gotten the proverbial round tuit just yet.

Lynn (D) - Team Voltage 386 Software and Coach

PS. Don't panic if you can't hear the Palmetto videos. Our VCR didn't pick up the audio. :(

Re: Best Autonomous
 

I watch some of your videos. It is impressive. Your success rate could be the highest or at least top five. Not sure who would be better.

Did you use the camera to get there?

Re: Best Autonomous
 

There's a story behind the retries... Ldeffenb up there didn't think it was going to happen, so a friend (lilbowser) and I went out to the Olive Garden, thought of a retry criteria, and brought it back to the meeting and implemented while our brain-fried software mentor took his dinner break... Oh yeah, this is 5:00PM, Monday night before ship.

Re: Best Autonomous
 

Yes, there's no other way to do it that often from that many angles (Palmetto Q29) without the camera. As a matter of fact, we noticed that the rack got seriously twisted by the refs just before our matches. :)

When you see the robot waddle (software's term) or swagger (team lead's term), you know it's tracking the light.

If the light was too far to the side, the robot would actually drive away from the light keeping it at the edge of the viewfinder until it came into closer alignment with the spider leg at which point it would turn back to the center to score. (Homework for the reader: what light geometry did we use to determine the fact that we were "on the beam"?)

Lynn (D) - Team Voltage 386 Software and Coach

Re: Best Autonomous
 

Ok, Chris gave me the tuit of uniform radius, so the autonomous-only videos are now on my BitTorrent tracker at http://ldeffenb.dnsalias.net:30049

You're looking for the torrents that start with "2007 386 Autonmomous". The UCF practice were first and are particularly awful. For the remainder of the UCF matches, we did better, but were still experimenting with non-center modes. At Palmetto, we did better but still messed around with the outside. Finally, in Atlanta on Archimedes, we got it all together and just stayed in our sweet spot.

Lynn (D) - Team Voltage 386 Software & Coach

PS. If you need a BitTorrent client, check out http://www.BitTornado.com or http://www.BitTorrent.com. For advanced users, use Azureus from http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

Re: Best Autonomous
 

I thought 330 had a wonderful autonomous, but 1730 was great. Both were equal.

Re: Best Autonomous
 

I'm guessing you used blobsize and your distance from the light. At any given distance to the light, there is a nice relationship between viewing angle and blob size, accurate to perhaps +/- 5 degrees.

That is how we started doing it with the Fighting Pi robot. Later on (after we got all the calibration data) we switched to just going to the light regardless of angle for expediency's sake.

In fact, something else we did was to have the robot get a blob size at one location and a blob size at another. By comparing the two you could get your exact position (within a couple inches) anywhere on the field and score on any spider leg.

In this case we had major portions of it working but the setup and calibration was questionable at the regionals (prior to them finally realizing they had to give us time on the actual playing field) so we scrapped it for a simpler system.

Autonomous is fun :)

Re: Best Autonomous
 

Almost, we used the ratio of height to width of the light. If we didn't think we were square enough in front of the light at the start, we drove to the side until the light appeared to be wider than it was tall. At that point, we turned back to center and went in for the score!

We wanted to do that, but with our Easy button spider foot detector and our method of carrying the keeper, we needed to be nearly square when we arrived. Otherwise, the ringer would not get over the stinger and the effort would be wasted.

Autonomous is what software teams live for! Our 15 seconds in the spotlight that wouldn't be possible without a robot that is controllable, reproducible, and fully accessorized with intelligent sensors. Any robot that can run a good autonomous can probably play the following game pretty well too!

Lynn (D) - Team Voltage 386 Software & Coach

Re: Best Autonomous
 

I am putting together a video of all the various bots auto modes. See the thread below:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=57184

I already have collected myself 33,39, 79. 116, 340, 341, 386. 424. 1629, 1730, 1902.

Go to the thread and add your URL to your video to be added to the video we are making. Please read the rules.

Re: Best Autonomous
 

You really need to get a video of Bomb Squad (team 16), their Ultrasonic Sensors were the most impressive sensor mechanisms for autonomous at the Lone Star Regional.

-Danny

Re: Best Autonomous
 

I would like to include them. Soap is down and I am not sure where to find their videos I can down load. If you can help I would appreciate it.

Re: Best Autonomous
 

To answer this, we actually did go across the field to the other side of the rack a few times. We didn't try this until the Championship, though, and we only used it at the beginning, so you might not have seen it.

Re: Best Autonomous
 

Team 16 or The Lone Star Regional on The Blue Alliance Match Archive System.

Cheers! :D

Re: Best Autonomous
 

Got it.

Re: Best Autonomous
 

I am putting together a video of every robot that did an auto mode. Can you send me an url of your favorite one of 1124, must be able to download it, youtube you can't download.