I've just returned from the West Springfield, MA competition. While there, I noticed that only about 50% of the teams actually had autonomous mode. I came up with an idea - what if autonomous could be simpler? And therefore, this was born:
https://github.com/JavaMatrix/TextBasedAutonomous
It's currently untested, but it's a proof of concept. This code makes autonomous easy. For example, our autonomous mode this year could be represented as:
chassis drive 1.0 0.0 2.0
"chassis": the subsystem to be activated.
"drive": the method to be called.
"1.0": the amount of power to give the wheels.
"0.0": the amount to turn.
"2.0": the number of seconds to run.
The signature of the method is:
Chassis.drive(power, twist)
and the command is run for 2 seconds. It's quite technical, and not quite polished. As of now you can only use primitive types and Strings for arguments, but it would be easy to add more types.
Thoughts on this system? Does it seem feasible?