Is hybrid valuable?

[Kims Robot]

Unfortunately this year it seems like using the Kinect for Hybrid was an afterthought. Most teams can get much greater accuracy by just lining up their robots manually and allowing an automode to run without using any sort of controlled input.

In 2010, hybrid could be very useful, as you did not know where the trackball would be starting, so your command could help signal the robot where the trackball was. This year, there really isn't input like that needed.

That said... I can think of two potential uses...
1. A delay timer so that you can wait for other robots to shoot the balls. If you want to be the last team to shoot, and there is a potential jam in the top basket, you might be able to use it to signal your robot when to start shooting (waiting for the others to finish) and if you want to shoot for the top or the middle.

2. To choose between tipping the bridge first or shooting first. As automodes get more and more advanced, many teams are going to try to tip the bridge in autonomous. This means you may want to be the first to the bridge, but it does require you to move from your starting position if you do it before shooting (risky for alignment). If you don't have a clear picture of your opponents auto strategy, you might allow your kinect driver to signal whether to go for the bridge or shoot first.

Both of those options are not really necessary. Good strategy, timing and prematch setup can account for all of that, however, if you wanted the challenge of using the kinect (my guess is that at least some of the Controls Awards will go to the few teams that use the kinect), those are potential uses for it.

I would say having a consistent autonomous is much much more important than using the kinect (in fact as an alliance captain I don't think I would care if you used it or not - I would just need to know that I didn't have two other teams that "require" it). And that if you are weighing tipping the bridge vs using the kinect, the option for tipping the bridge adds more value to the alliance.

[who716]

Hyrid is very very important, we just came back from the bae system granite state regional and you could win the game just with hybrid mode, the kinect however not to many teams used it. and i couldn't really tell and advantage of it as you can just set the robot up into autonomous to do everything that you want it to do for example shoot, tip the bridge, both and so on.

[Alpha Beta]

Originally Posted by Kims Robot

In 2010, hybrid could be very useful, as you did not know where the trackball would be starting, so your command could help signal the robot where the trackball was.

20102008

[JPM0887]

I think I only seen one or two teams use it at GSR this past weekend, none were successful.

[JesseK]

It will be useful to prevent the loser of the "Battle of the Bridge" from tipping over completely. It may be useful to select different autonomous modes (stand in place, go to fender, delay, go to colored bridge, go to white bridge). It's probably useful as a direct range-finding camera on-board the robot (subject to the extra necessary resources).

Had we received the Kinect pre-season, I think we'd see more teams using it. Yet for this year, we felt it was a distraction outside of the above scenarios.

[DjScribbles]

So, I've gone ahead and implemented kinect control into our robot, right away I noticed a big problem that I just want to make people aware of:

The Intel Atom processor (or at least the one in our netbook) was struggling quite badly to keep up with the kinect processing. Luckily we have a semi modern laptop (and a second computer that I can switch to for programming) to use as our driverstation.

Using our DS which is equivalent to this (it's got 1gig ram and a N570(1.66GHz)) I was seeing approximately 0.5-1.0 second delay in things like throttle control. Switching to the other computer (it's got a intel core2duo, but don't know the specs) it works significantly better.

I'm pretty excited to see how this works this weekend (we'll be in Traverse City MI, team 2474), as we've only had about 5 minutes of test time so far