Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

Next Year, no matter the game, I challenge you to make your robot fully autonomous. That means autonomous during tele operation period too. Anyone up for that challenge? That would challenge your skills and dedication to the robot. That means no more just drive up 3 feet, kick, repeat type of coding. It would have to be a lot more thought out and will have to use real life robot coding. Its not really a robot if its not autonomous, its just an over glorified RC car if its human controlled. And if you are still sceptical, FIRST pretty much writes the libraries so that even a guy that picks up a programming book can code the robot in a week or even less... Well IMHO you can't learn programming from a book, sure you may learn the language and syntax, but you have to have experience to actually program. Programming comes with experience, and the way FIRST makes it, you get minimum experience as a programmer programming these robots. I will be announcing to my club next year that we want to try this. Just post your opinions and I will add to the list if you want to take the challenge.

Teams That Are Willing To Take The Challenge:

*Team 589 (Just Me As Of Now)
*Team 33
*Team 2503
*Team 1086

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

I will give you an internet high-five even if you just attempt this.

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

I'm not a programmer, but I do know that because of the was the field system works, you will have to have the program read that it is now in teleoperated, and then begin a program.

But why not, instead of fully autonomous, make it to where it is mostly autonomous. Meaning that the only thing that isn't autonomous is driving across the field. So you drive a long distance, flip a switch, and then it does the rest on it's own? I'm not a programmer, but I have a feeling FULLY autonomous may be a little to hard. (My programmer has less hair than he had at the beginning of the season... )

Just my $0.02

Good luck!
-Rion

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

Was thinking of the switch too, if the robot is acting really dumb and going away from the action, you can flip a switch to get you into the real teleop mode... Teleop mode is way easier to code than auto so it will be a breeze

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

Wow..

That would be pretty challenging. I think it would have to involve AI... One would have to code in game strategy, get the robot to line the ball up to the goal, avoid penalties, use the camera to identify balls and enemy robots...

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

:rolleyes: Don't use the word "ball" FIRST come up with some wacky games...

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

During this off season I am going to be working on finishing up my ADK (autonomous dev. kit).

The plan is to try to have a fully autonomous robot as a proof of concept.

My personal goal is to make a programming platform that even rookie teams could use to have a decent autonomous.

The more teams we get to have autonomous the more FIRST will work to help us improve it (personally i would love for them to add the zigbee into the KOP so robots could communicate).

cheers

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

Thats great, but what language(s) will it be in? Because I think if FIRST will distribute it, you probably will have to port it to the other languages

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

I don't think the drivers would go for that otherwise I would SO do that! :rolleyes:

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

I'm nearly certain that 1756 won't be doing full-autonomous the whole match. That is, unless that's the challenge for next year. If it is the challenge next year, well just see how that goes. As always, we will probably try to incorporate autonomous actions into teleop.

Best of luck to you if you can run autonomous the whole time. Your drivers will look pretty useless, though.

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

I have some pretty radiacl ideas, I wanted to do full autonomous this year but never got to do it since I was new this year, so no one really listens to you... I think I want to make a 4 legged robot to go to the competition legally by my senior year

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

A programmer mentor and myself talked about a fully autonomous robot for 2008 Overdrive. But we couldn't convince the other mentors or the students to go for it. He had most of the code written for it by the end of the 1st week while we were still deciding what we wanted to do.

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

Heh. That's a big challenge. Not impossible, but a big challenge indeed.

If I had a chance to do this for total fun (i.e. not in a competitive sense where points matter ergo not a regional), I think it would be fun though I think it would be really hard to sense the environment around the robot. There's only so much ultrasonic sensors, touch sensors, and a camera can pick up. I'm sure there are more advanced sensors, but there's a point where the robots look less and less like FIRST robots and more like DARPA cars with LIDAR and 5 different cameras plus infrared imaging.

Do I think it'd be neat? Yeah. Easy? Nope.

About the most automated thing I've done for the teleoperated mode is let the robot put our robot's kicker in the correct position and backwind the rope we used to bring the kicker back. Probably not the autonomous we're thinking of, but thought I'd add it in.

I still think it'd be fun. I want to play with some ultrasonic sensors and the camera during the off-season just to have fun and learn something new about autonomous.

-Tanner

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

Im thinking of using a couple IR sensors (one for each side) and a couple ultra sound ones too to track the closer stuff. And a couple gyros (yes couple) to keep the robot from going all crazy looking like a drunk driver or something, it has to go straight at least

Re: Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You
 

I've done one thing with one gyro and it's worked quite well. I didn't actually use it for anything, but what it showed was quite neat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdKXQo65T9E

From what I know, using IR/ultrasonic sensors will just give you a relatively blurry image of the outside world. What you do with that data is the hard part. How do I differentiate between a robot, a wall, and a goal? Friend/Foe? Acquisition of game element?

I know of ways to do it, but it'd be complicated. As I said earlier, it'd be challenging. Would I have fun doing it? Oh yeah...

-Tanner