Autonomous Period

[Andy Grady]

Did anyone get that bad feeling in the pit of your stomach when the demo robots FIRST had weren't working in autonomous mode? The autonomous period scares me...

10 Seconds of Human time + 15 seconds of robots moving in circles = 25 seconds of dead air.

I really hope this isn't the case.

Good Luck,
Andy Grady

[Jeff Rodriguez]

yeah i got that feeling.

If FIRST's robots don't move than whose will?

[E Jones 234]

i don't think it will be that bad... at least i hope not! this will definitely make the programming a lot more... interesting.

[Gope]

I think most teams will make it happen, if I learned one thing from last years game it's that teams will acomplish amazing things even those seemingly impossible. But I sure wouldn't wan't to be the guy charged with programing the auto-mode.

[Caleb Fulton]

It's only my first year, but I've done a lot of programming before...I don't think that seeking a target with reflective tape on it or following a line is that difficult to program. The latter I have done before with the Lego RCX robotics kit and it was surprisingly easy. The fact that NONE of their robots seemed to work leads me to believe that something was wrong with their entire control system, maybe?

[Norm M.]

The autobalancing routine that was posted by the TechnoKats (?) is an example of a dead reckoning program. Shouldn't be too tough to program a forward, turn, forward, turn, forward that would plow over the ramp.

Remember, like all the mechanical engineers say- "let them fix it in software!!"

I suspect the autonomous period is to distract from the naysayers who always use the 'it isn't a robot because it is remote controlled' type lines. 15 seconds isn't that much time, I think it will be very interesting to see what people come up with.

[Ryan Dognaux]

So during autonomus period, will the robots be basically like huge Lego RCX's??? ... I mean, will you be able to program in go right, straight for 2 seconds, left, back, etc. ?

[Ryan Curry]

They tried operating the robots after the autonomy period and could still not get them to work, as well I saw the drivers station lights blinking on the off a couple of times. My guess is that they werent getting power to the drivers stations, and/or they transmitters weren't seding signals to the robots. I dont think it had anyting to do with the programming.

-Rc

[Ben Mitchell]

I instantly had visions of robots crashing into each other.

Personally, I would have several programs loaded, and communicate with my alliance partner as to who's doing what befire hand, so there aren't and (wince) crashes.

[Jferrante]

how exactly is the bot switched from autonomous mode to regular? do we have to put in an autonomous subroutine or if statement to make it function on its own? I took a look at the new program but the number of tokenizing errors made it difficult to understand some of it. Any help would be appreciated.

[Ken Delaney]

In the code there is already an alias defined to see if you are in autonomous mode called "auton_mode" . It is bit 6 of the PBmode variable.

There is an example of how to code for this in the Programming Reference Guide, which can be found in the documents section at Innovation First's web site The example is written as
If auton_mode = 1 then do_autonomous_stuff
'Normal drive code
goto end_of_autonomous

do_autonomous_stuff:
'Autonomous mode code
end_of_autonomous:

The Programming Reference Guide is well done. It will be a big help to new PBasic programmers.
As one of the coaches of the control team I am really looking forward to developing the autonomous mode code. Of course I say this now, talk to me in six weeks.

[AJ Quick]

/me wonders if anyone will try to do the whole event with out radio control.

[Noah]

I think that I might build a switch into our controls... "Autonomous Mode <> Remote Control"

We'd run in auto until something sticky came up.

[Spikey]

One correction, only the 15 seconds are apart of the actual 2 minutes of the game. The other 10 seconds for the human players are seperate from the game time.

I liked the direct drive robot in the demo All that crashing was funny.

I don't think anyone will go it on all AI for the game but who knows.

[Ian Mathew]

I don't like the idea of having the bots run around for 15 seconds without anything to keep them from ramming eachother. I think FIRST decided to make scoring for fans easier, but actually forming a strategy for it harder than anything.