Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri
A major problem I see students struggling with is not in logic development, but rather in nitty gritty low level mechanical interfacing issues. They seem to grasp what the robot needs to do, and usually can come up with a pretty good implementation. The problem is the mechanical systems are lacking, and there is no easy out of the box solution to make up for this. One big example is the "my robot doesn't drive straight" issue. Teams are forced to spend alot of time tuning their robot to drive straight (most of the time without using feedback) before they can accomplish higher level goals. Usually these teams have about 27 minutes to test software before the robot is shipped, and are flustered while trying to work at the competition.
Now what if we had a system that could do dynamic simulation or at least object oriented design so that teams could drop in a "drive straight" module and get to the real logic based issues?
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If the new control system can guarantee that our robot will drive straight, I'm 100% on board. Our software team would enjoy the extra couple of weeks that would give us. But I'm afraid it's never as simple as dropping in some module, each robot has its own complex behaviors that affect its performance; no two robots drive exactly the same, even if they have the same general design. What works for one robot may not work for another. For example, some robots that don't turn well can't be made to drive straight by using different motor speeds on each side. The ability to drive straight with a chassis that just doesn't want to or control an unwieldy arm is an extremely difficult problem that either requires advanced math to model the system (which I've never been exposed to) or lots of guesswork (which I'm all too familiar with
). I certainly hope that if FIRST bills the new control system as a way to magically make all the nitty-gritty controls problems go away, they succeed. I know they've over stated the abilities of the modules they've given us in the past, I hope they don't do it again.