Re: Bad luck, or poor execution?
 

It took me 3 years to get my programming mentor to finally keep "drive straight" code OUT of tele-operated period. It's "useful" but isn't necessary to drive in the game. In the end, it robs us of torque for acceleration.

Essentially, due to drift and slip, we don't even use our drive train encoders or gyro after autonomous. The caveat with this is that the driver has had plenty of practice on an open-loop skid-steer system.

Re: Bad luck, or poor execution?
 

Poorly tuned control loops are worse than no control loops; A good lesson to be learned...

Also, once you reach a certain point of quality with your drive (minimizing friction, etc...) the "Drive straight" code becomes almost useless. Most of our recent drivetrains have had no drift issues.

Re: Bad luck, or poor execution?
 

actually, building a "sophisticated bot" is not always the best, often the most simple designs that have you saying "why didn't we think of that??" are the best!

Re: Bad luck, or poor execution?
 

Amen to that!

Re: Bad luck, or poor execution?
 

Joe,

Where in Philadelphia are you and your team located? My team and I will be running workshops on robot design, wiring, electronics, and automation sometime this summer or in the fall before build season. Let me know if you are interested or just want some help in general.

Also, if you could, post up a few pictures of your robot. I didn't get to go around and pit scout like I usually would, so I don't remember your robot. Pictures and video would help identify key problems.

Akash

Re: Bad luck, or poor execution?
 

We are located in Northeast Philadelphia and operate out of Father Judge high school.

For pictures, the only ones I have on hand are very basic images of the robot early in the build season, but it should be enough to remind you of our bot.


The final design for the tower had it standing up at all times. Like I said, this was early in the build season.

Also, here are some specs:

• mecanum wheels powered by 4 cim motors with Toughbox gearboxes
• encoders on each of the gear boxes
• elevator/forklift design manipulator powered by window motor
• encoder on elevator to determine heights
• IR distance sensors to measure distance from alliance wall

Re: Bad luck, or poor execution?
 

We used Sharp IR distance sensors to get the distance from the alliance wall at the Finger Lakes Regional and discovered that they do not give reliable numbers for the brightly lit diamond-plate wall at competitions. We switched to a sonar sensor (XL-MaxBotix-EZ2) for the Philadelphia Regional and were able to get a much better reading of the distance to the alliance wall.