The biggest thing we learned is that the autonomous mode needs lots of testing. My team literally didn't have a working robot until 30 minutes before we had to crate it up. Therefore, I had no opportunity to work on the autonomous mode before the practice rounds at the regional. Then, it took me all day before I had something that worked reasonably well. So here are some gotchas I ran into:
- Test, test, test!
- Be careful that you don't rely solely on the IR sensor - remember, if the IR sensor is mounted in the center of your robot, it will try to drive through the wall to get to the beacon!
- Be very careful with overheating/driving too fast. One robot had one goal in its autonomous mode: rush the other side, ram us from the front and push us backwards while we were driving forward. That killed our motors several times.
- Simple is sometimes better. We scrapped the original IR-only design for a timed system that worked a bit better.
- Test, test, test!
--Quentin