Quote:
Originally Posted by nonother
What have you seen in autonomous mode and why do you believe it to be overall to be relatively simplistic?
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My guess regarding the poor autonomous showing is that a large number of teams are rookies and have so many hurdles to overcome that autonomous programming gets put on the back burner, since you can't really start programming until mechanical design is more or less complete.
In our region, we've seen 8 teams that have attended 2 scrimmages. As of the most recent scrimmage (2 weeks ago), only 2 had any autonomous programming at all. Some still haven't finalized the chassis and wheels (they keep putting the robot together and taking it apart). It could be that there are some really advanced "sleeper" teams at our tournament in less than a week, but my guess is that on the average, teams that attend a scrimmage would tend to be somewhat more motivated than those that don't.
We've didn't really start programming in earnest until 3 weeks ago, partly because we were still working on major mechanical issues, but partly because we couldn't get our software to work on any school computer, even having called Intelitek tech support 3 times (they tried their best, but the time zone difference was a problem) and getting the district administrators to work on unlocking the hard drive twice. We finally gave up and are using a borrowed private laptop.
Our programming is simple: dump 1 or 2 balls and push 4 balls into the low goal, all using dead reckoning. The other team we saw dumps 1-2 balls into the low goal. If we had more time, we might consider using sensors to navigate around the field to get more balls in. But one concern that we had was that too much running around the field might interfere with our alliance partner's movements. As it is, we have to create a mirror program, in case our path on our preferred side interferes with our partner.