Automatic catcher?

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by safiq10

Now Catching I believe is going to be a huge thing! (especially if you are a defensive/ support robot.... Like us) So my team was discussing if automatic catching would be possible. We thought that maybe you would use your camera to track the ball but that is as far as we got. We were wondering how it would be done and coded?

It is. We have done it.

This sensor (we're using two of them right now): https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8504

The sensor outputs an analog signal. To calibrate it we held the ball where we wanted our trigger point to be and recorded that value. The driver holds down a button on the control interface to open our catching mechanisms and when the sensor sees something that crosses the trigger point value the catcher snaps shut.

We added all of the hardware and code in the last two days of build, it's really simple and straight-forward.

Until then we were getting good results with driver reflexes, but wanted to automate it to remove some burden from the driver.