Regarding The Control System Award.

[davidthefat]

I think it was the Rockwell Automations award that award the team for the best or most innovative control system award. One of the criteria was intuitive programming or something. How does a judge "judge' a piece of code that they never see? I have yet to have a judge come up to me to look at the code from the last 3 regionals I been to in my career.

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

I think it was the Rockwell Automations award that award the team for the best or most innovative control system award. One of the criteria was intuitive programming or something. How does a judge "judge' a piece of code that they never see? I have yet to have a judge come up to me to look at the code from the last 3 regionals I been to in my career.

I guess they judge the way the robot moves in autonomous though I remember one team winning it in 2008 and all they did was ram into the wall so hard they knocked teams controls off the drivers station (and broke a few as well). Maybe they thought it was a clever strategy.

[AllenGregoryIV]

I believe you are talking about the Innovation in Control Award. The DiscoBots have won this award twice this season at both Alamo and Lone Star. This award is awarded to a team that is able to describe to the judges how they have used control system components to improve the function of their robot. The judges never actually see the code what they see is how the robot performs on the field and what you show them when they stop by your pit and they ask you to describe the robot. This year we made sure to have all of our students updated on the control system so even the mechanical team members could give an explanations of how our sensors and autonomous code functioned. It's also not just the autonomous award it is also for using sensors and the control system in other aspects of the robot as well.

[rsisk]

Allen is pretty much correct, the control also has to be effective on the field, that is what the match observers are there for.

Also, as a judge, I have asked to look at code. Most judges are not programmers, but having a programming background, I always tried to ask some of the teams about their programming.

If you think your code merits a look for an Innovation in Controls award, or other awards such as Creativity, or a Judges award, have a single page description of why you feel this is the case. Be clear and remember you may be explaining it to someone that does not know programming. Include snippets of the code in subsequent pages to support your explanation on the first single page. Then, make sure this gets into the hands of the judges, particularly the ones that are asking machine related questions.

[RyanCahoon]

In my mind, judges giving a control system award on the basis of coding proficiency would be similar to giving one of the design awards based off of the quality of welds on a robot, or something similar. Both have a contributing factor into the effectiveness of the design - higher quality "construction" leads to greater reliability and cleaner presentation - but the real "meat and potatoes" comes in the design process: how the team analyzed the game and determined necessary features, the steps you went through in figuring out how those features would be implemented, selection of technologies to use, and then how well the implementation was carried out and how it performs. So yes, the code may factor into the complete package, but for these awards, the process that led to an effective design, and the raw performance of the design, (in my opinion) are more important than specific details of implementation. Also keep in mind that many of these awards are given for ability to articulate your unique features to the judges, and just showing them your code may not rank very high in this regard.

--Ryan

P.S. keep in mind that programming != coding

[SkyWarrior]

This year we got this award at Dallas Regional. A very rewarding thing for a 3rd year team (which dramatically sucked during its first 2 years).

Our robot had nothing too special however we used a dual elevator system which i have not seen at any other team. Many teams snaked their treads or wires to pull all the elevator to all the way up but our elevator was actually made out of 2 seperate elevators. If one of them fails the other can take over and score and often the positioning was better than most snaked elevators.

We used 6 inc mecanum wheels with shaft drive. Our autonomous worked 50% of the time but we did not ram into any one.

Nonetheless we did not use any sensors to track our movement in the autonomous but we used timed movements. (hours of practice needed and still room to improve.)

Our elevator was using a very simple servo to hold the tube with a finger at its tip. This finger started at 0 degrees at the beginning and when robot reached the racks servo moved to 90 degrees to drop the tube to the rack in front of us.

I would love to thank that post available on Chief Delphi that taught this LabView rookie how to use timers and loops in a more effective way though.