Hi all,
Today we mounted our shooter/pickup mechanism onto our robot. The way we have it set up, it starts in a starting position, and in autonomous rotates to shooting position. Throughout the match, we will be rotating between shooting and pickup positions. We found that that the robot is cumbersome to move in any position but the starting position, and since we will almost certainly not be finishing the match in that position, our drivers would like a way to move the robot back to starting position before attempting to move the robot off the field. It would be difficult for us to put a mechanical release on our tilt mechanism, so we were brainstorming different ways to accomplish this.
The best idea we came up with was a "control board" of sorts on the physical robot that could manipulate our tilt motors through disabled-mode code. We would obviously design and implement it in a way that it has minimal (we're talking probably a key switch to activate the board) chance of accidentally activating. We browsed the rules and Q&A, and there are no rules specifically prohibiting this, or any robot movement during "disabled" mode, autonomous or human-controlled. We do see disabled defined in the glossary as "a state in which a ROBOT has been commanded by the Driver Station to deactivate all outputs," but this does not lay the problem to rest for some members of our team (they argue that we aren't prohibited to sudo the robot into listening to our movement instructions for our intended purpose.)
Has anyone had any experience with questioning this definition in years past? We could not find a similar question in this year's Q&A, but we have a question pending. We just wanted to see if any of you guys could be any faster since it's so close to bag&tag.
Thanks!
