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Re: Making autonomous accessible to all teams
For my team, I didn't think about programming autonomous until the 4-5th week into the season. I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn't know exactly how I wanted to execute it. During the season when I was writing the code for the robot, I kept it in a format so that I could simply tell it what I wanted it to do, and the rest of the code would take care of it without me having to think about it. Combining this format with autonomous made it very easy for me to program autonomous including the various sensors that was required for the kicking system on the robot to work. Though, it did take me a regional to get it right due to lack of testing (mostly my fault though).
I think autonomous programming can be made easily enough if the programmer has made things modular (i.e. like I did) thereby reducing the workload when it comes to the autonomous part.
As an idea over the summer, I was thinking about teaching some interested programmers some of the thought-process that is required for programmign a FRC robot (or for that matter anything) with an arduino with a few sensors set up and perhaps a servo or two. It's a small and relatively cheap platform that is quite easy to use. To program it runs a C-like language, so it's not quite ideal for LabVIEW use, but I'm sure it could be easily modified for such.
-Tanner
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