Quote:
Originally Posted by Dale
For teams without software mentors, the current FRC programming environments are just too difficult. While our team has never had a issue (since we have four years of computer science at our school) you only need to look at the number of robots on the field that just sit there during autonomous to understand that there's a problem.
There really needs to be something of the level of RobotC or even NXT-G (written in LabVIEW, by the way) for teams in this situation. LabVIEW is too much for some teams, forget about C++ or Java. A nice simple development environment and an easy to learn language is what it will take. |
I have to disagree. I hadn't used LabVIEW at all before the first week of build this year, and I was able to program multiple, successful autonomous modes by the time the build season ended. And I'm really not a programming genius either. The WPI Library, example code, and context help really allowed me to understand the way LabVIEW works, and I thought that going about editing Autonomous Independent VI was very intuitive and straightforward. By the end of MSC (the last competition where we used LabVIEW), our autonomous code was very advanced and used encoders, a pot, a gyro, and multiple PIDs. This proves that it doesn't take a really experienced programmer to use multiple sensors working together to implement an autonomous mode.
I've seen people on this forum complain that a team needs no programming skills, because everything is handed to them in the WPI Library. This might be true... If you want to use a simple tank drive or an arcade drive or holonomic drive or PID, that's all pre-programmed. I have to say thank you to the WPI Library, because without it, I would have had a much much harder time programming in LabVIEW. However I do think that in this advanced, high school level robotics competition with professional mentors, we should be using REAL programming languages and REAL programming environments. Not something like RobotC or NXTG that we're never going to see in our lives. Besides, we're learning about these more advanced languages in school and if not, the pre-knowledge of a language like C++ or Java or LabVIEW will vastly help for college courses and eventually careers in computers. Remember, this is a learning experience and preparation for college and careers in engineering, not just a robotics competition.
Perhaps the real reason why close to a majority of robots do not move in autonomous is that the teams did not have enough time to program or test their autonomous modes. Or, maybe they couldn't find the room or manpower to make a practice field. I could imagine many teams at the end of week 6 were just thinking about getting their robot together, or making weight, or getting their kicker to work, or adding a ball possession mechanism, or doing anything that the team considers more important than getting an autonomous working. I think that any team that has at least one dedicated programmer from week one can figure out how to do an autonomous, but whether or not there is time to debug and test it at the end of the season is a different story.