Autonomous Routines

[Powers]

While watching the practice rounds of the UVA regional Thursday i saw only one autonomous mode work, and that took 8 seconds, i have not been able to watch any matches since then, and i was wondering if ppl have withheld their routines for friday.

[George1902]

if you got there in 4-6 seconds, you had an advantage. 8-10 seconds and you were still in pretty good shape. if you weren't there by 10 sec, you prolly didn't get to the center until the 15 sec were over and you got control of your bot yourself.

unlike other aspects of the game that might improve throughout the year (robot relaibility, driver ability) i think the auto mode will be just about like this all season long.

a bot with a successful auto mode will be quite valuable in the finals, so why hide your auto mode? it may be the very thing that gets you picked!

[Powers]

Well, I've heard that the auto modes have improved, so now i am not so worried, wouldnt have been a FIRST competition w/o teams being able to do everything possible.

[David.Cook]

? do you mean VCU (not UVA)?

I don't think people were withholding auton mode programs. I think many teams just hadn't gotten them working or completely tested.

I won't speculate on the numbers of teams who either didn't have one, or hadn't tried it out. We had pretested ours before we shipped, but they needed a lot of refinement on Thursday. Even with that we had one program that still wasn't ready for primetime. Even so I was asked by a number of teams to help them solve problems with auton mode.

In any case, by Sat there were many teams with good working auton modes.

[Tyler Olds]

you will see an improvement in auto modes after each week of regionals. This is because you can work on programming after the build, so teams that have late regionals will most likely have better auto modes in regionals.

[PMGRACER]

There were several teams at the GLR that fully functional and really cool Auton modes. The fastest were at the stack in about 3.2 seconds. By Nats most teams should be on their game.

[gumby]

Our robot uses a plain dead reckoning system to get up the ramp.. We can do it in about 4-6 seconds...

[heimdallr]

At the northwest regional, team 16 had about a 2.6 ish fastest time , if I remember right. Not bad hit 3 or 4 stacks realy well. Thats definatly the best time I've seen.


BTW the time was recorded by the W.A.S.H. system provided by Team 111

[George1902]

by noon on friday of Peachtree, we had our auto working again. (never edit a program without saving a back up!)

3.5 sec to the stacks going left and 4.5 sec going right. we hit 3 or 4 stacks.

much props to our programmers for getting it working again!

i hope auto mode is here to stay, but i also hope they change it just a bit. for example, this year's main tasks in auto could have been done in 10 sec. i saw lots of matches where nothing was being done for the last 5 sec of auto mode. just a thought.

[Jeff Waegelin]

We have 10 different auto programs (5 for each side). They're not ridiculously fast, but we can meet most teams at the top, and take out 6 stacks.

[Tyler Olds]

Dead reckoning is great and all (gets you up the fastest) but remember to perfect it. Every team that I went up against that used dead reckoning except for 930 fell to the hands of my bins being placed in front of it in a certain way configured for each robot. Just make sure you arnt thrown off at all by the bins.

[David.Cook]

No problem there...

Sparky hasn't been knocked off course by bins in any matches to date. We did get slammed into the ramp side by our alliance partner once Too bad, we won't get to face 93 unless we get to the playoffs, as we are in Archimedes division

I will say the other auton mode problem I have seen is 'bots that extend wings during auton, only to have those wings catch on the side walls and take the robot off course into the side. That seems to happen pretty frequently.

See ya in Houston!

[MRL180YTL2002]

SPAM never actually got past falling down. Even then, we kept on having to fix our wings, wrist, and/or arm after many of our matches. This and wiring we're doing on Thursday. That's the plan.

[dlavery]

Originally posted by George1083
i hope auto mode is here to stay, but i also hope they change it just a bit. for example, this year's main tasks in auto could have been done in 10 sec. i saw lots of matches where nothing was being done for the last 5 sec of auto mode. just a thought.

And so does that mean:

A) there aren't 15 seconds worth of things to do in autonomous mode - absolutely everything that COULD be done by the robots IS being done; all the additional time and sensors and programming in the world won't make any difference because there is nothing left to do; or

B) the robots that stop autonomous operations after 10 seconds aren't programmed to take full advantage of the resources (time) available to them; as teams get used to programming their robots for autonomous operations they will discover things like error recovery routines, subsumption architectures, execution monitoring, contingency planning, fault recovery trees, etc. etc. etc. and start to make use of them to squeeze every possible operation out of every available second.

Just a thought.

-dave

[KenWittlief]

we gave serious thought to having an 'uncontested' auton mode (switch selectable before the match begins). If our scouts told us our opponents would do nothing, then we would let our bot hit the wall as it normally does, then back up and turn a bit, hit it again, back up, turn somemore, hit it again... to push as much of the wall into our scoring zone as possible.

we also considered using the last 7 seconds of auton mode to do the Hokey-Pokey :c)