Quote:
Originally Posted by LinuxArchitect
No offense, but I always laugh when people use the terms forward/front and backward/rear. When you do, you are limiting your actions. Except for the act of driving itself, who cares? It's not like you are actually sitting on the robot facing the forward direction of the drivetrain and you have to look over your shoulder to shoot "backwards". Your robot can move and face in any direction. Therefore, you might want it to shoot in any direction.
In this case, perhaps you are in the process of collecting a ball. Murphy says the ball will be in the most awkward location possible. Your design decision is, can I shoot immediately, or do I need to rotate the chassis. As mentioned, a small deadzone might be acceptable. But full 180 turns to shoot might not be.
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Understood, however I don't understand your logic behind the no front/back thing. You can't just drive your car backwards on a freeway and say it's forwards. For the most part, robots are going to have a designated "front" and a designated "back". That means when you go forward on your controller, your robot will go forwards.
I agree. Your robot itself is capable in moving every which direction it wants. So why have a totally separate part of the robot that turns independently of your robot when you can turn your robot just as easily in any way it wants? Unless your robot can hardly turn, or you haven't considered the robot's orientation a factor during the match, turning a robot 180 degrees is the same as turning a turret 180 degrees, if not faster since most drives are powered by 4 CIMs, whereas most turrets are going to be powered by one of the weaker motors. I've seen robots turn 180 degrees pretty fast.
As for limiting actions, isn't that what engineering is all about? Tradeoffs. Torque vs speed is my favorite one. And sometimes you end up limiting things you don't really need anyways.
As for your Murphy's law example (My favorite law

), there are so many ways to engineer your robot so that doesn't happen, and good driver training will easily be able to fix a ball in an awkward position.
I'm not at all saying turrets are bad, and love all of the videos that are being posted. Just that there are ways to make an effective robot without turrets.