Bad luck, or poor execution?

[PriyankP]

Originally Posted by nitneylion452

our driving seemed to be very off, our drivers would twist left and the robot would rotate right. We attempted to fix this, but with no success (we believe that the issue was our encoders, one on each wheel, were "arguing" with each other, but we didn't think of this until it was too late).

If something like this happens and you don't know where the problem was or how to fix it, the quickest solution would be to get rid of the encoder code all together. Encoders improve the base control, but they're not a must have sensors!

Similar thing happened to 188 last year. We had meccanum base and we had encoders on all four pods. The encoder code that we had was written using the practice robot and it worked beautifully until we got to our first regional. The encoder code didn't work on the competition robot. We spent about 3-4 hours trying to fix it with no luck, eventually we decided to get rid of the code and it turned out that as long as the battery was fully charged, the base would go straight.

Anyways, in short, sensors are great but you should always have code that doesn't depend on sensors. This year we had two versions of the code, one that uses sensors for better control and one that uses no sensors (skeleton code). Always learn from past mistakes. I have a feeling you guys won't have a similar problem next year.

My $0.02.