[Monochron]

As no one has mentioned it yet I figure I will add a bit of warning against over-automating.
Automating robot tasks can be a really powerful tool as long as it is used appropriately. Be careful of automating too many tasks though or tasks that rely on a lot of different variables.

I'll give an example; in last year's game we realized that our ball-pickup mechanism was rather slow so we decided to automate a lot of the process. The operator would hold down a button to drop our grabber and turn on our intake roller and then release the button to stop the roller and return to a "carry" position. In general it worked well but would occasionally cause us to have problems if the ball was falling out of our grabber, if we didn't approach the ball straight-on, or even if we were getting defended while trying to pick up. Basically it gave our drivers even more tasks to be mindful of (making sure to kill the automation if it was going to make us drop the ball or miss the ball, etc.)
Even worse was that on occasion a bug would crop up where the automation could not be interrupted. It took us a long time to catch what the issue was because it was so intermittent and in the meantime we would drop a ball and have to wait while our pick-up moved to "carry" position and then all the way back to "pick-up" position. It was pain and we looked pretty bad on the field.

I think it was in one of 254's publications that they said automation is best used for tasks that a human cannot do efficiently, or that a computer could do more efficiently. Stacking totes in this year's game lended itself to automation. If a tote was fully inside your gripper (as detected by sensors) then it was likely that you were going to be able to lift it.

In our situation automation didn't really speed anything up. We still had to wait for the grabber to move between pick-up positions and the grabber itself either needed many more sensors to be sure the ball was captured or needed the operator to visualy verify that the ball was captured.