Quote:
Originally Posted by Bongle
Why not arm unfolding? Because you can do that in the time it takes your human player to run forward and toss the first ringer
Why not move forward? Risk of ringer-ing yourself or an alliance member ringer-ing you on the first toss. You're safer in the 'shadow' of the driver wall.
Why not move across the field and prepare to defend? I saw a few teams get tangled on the rack trying this. In order to avoid entangling yourself, you need the gyros and accelerometers as well as the programming skill to use them, which is nearly as hard as the camera.
Totally agree with this. You CANNOT make an effective autonomous mode from scratch at the competition, unless you have a godlike hardware team. At the competition, there will always be repairs to be done, bolts to be tightened, kajiggers to be lubed and polished. The programming team only gets robot access when all those things are done, which is never. You need substantial alone time with the robot during the build period in order to develop and test autonomous mode, which requires a fast hardware team.
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If you put sensors on your arm like you _REALLY SHOULD_, and have the PID code already tuned for it, unfolding your arm is not difficult. We only had to write 2 extra lines of code to set up our arm.
Even if you have a godlike hardware team (or really good luck, in our case) and your robot is working properly and doesn't require any hardware adjustments between matches, it's very difficult to write a proper autonomous mode. We abstained from making an autonomous mode simply because our robot was working well enough that we didn't want to make any changes at all.
I agree with a lot of the people on this thread - autonomous mode isn't worth nearly as much as it could be. Yes, it could mean a lot of points, but it's one tube. Even the spoiler factor isn't worth all that much. In a row of 7, if the keeper is placed in the center, if you spoil one spot off center, that row is still dropped to 20. We focused on improving our teleoperated mode code enough that it would help us score at least one more tube. It worked.