[davidthefat]

Originally Posted by 45Auto

I'm not "blaming" anyone for anything, just trying to point out that a decent full-autonomous may not be quite as simple as you are assuming, given the level of performance you have demonstrated. I would disagree that what you have is the best you could do, an adjustable kicker would have no effect on how many balls you could kick out of the far zone. Just a matter of driving to each ball and kicking (sounds simple doesn't it?). It doesn't get much easier than knowing EXACTLY where each ball is located when you start and not having to worry about any defending robots.

We could only kick one ball in autonomous because one of our encoders died and there is no way to change it without dismantling half the robot. The robot has a small drift to the left and there wasn't time to get the time-based autonomous to compensate for it. Hopefully having all encoders working at Atlanta will allow us to clear whichever zone we are in. I would consider clearing our zone of balls (or scoring from the front zone) a minimum level of autonomous competence to shoot for. Many of the top teams already do this. Our programmers have been working on it all season and haven't got there yet.

Rather than trying to develop a full-autonomous game, it may be to your advantage to try smaller steps. Demonstrating a working 15 second autonomous that would at least clear the zone you are in would be a more attainable goal, and could possibly help in persuading your team to attempt more complicated building (you need to integrate the sensors into your robot) and programming projects.

The last paragraph: I have been trying to do that since day one, I wanted a kicker that shoots ACCURATELY from the 3 zone... But my ideas just got shot down because I was new to the club and the team did not have faith in themselves, since our history of robots are not the best, infact I heard ours this year was the best out of all our robots... but I say it needs TONS of improvements...