A more autonomous teleop?

[thatprogrammer]

Originally Posted by Monochron

I'll give an example; in last year's game we realized that our ball-pickup mechanism was rather slow so we decided to automate a lot of the process. The operator would hold down a button to drop our grabber and turn on our intake roller and then release the button to stop the roller and return to a "carry" position. In general it worked well but would occasionally cause us to have problems if the ball was falling out of our grabber, if we didn't approach the ball straight-on, or even if we were getting defended while trying to pick up. Basically it gave our drivers even more tasks to be mindful of (making sure to kill the automation if it was going to make us drop the ball or miss the ball, etc.)
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A lot of teams automated their pick ups in 2014. I think what might have not been done in this case was designing with that automation in mind. Perhaps you could have optimized it more by adding a beam break to tell when the ball was in, and made the intake go back to 'carry' by itself?
My point is: Automation should be considered during the design process, doing it too late is often sloppy.

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by thatprogrammer

Perhaps you could have optimized it more by adding a beam break to tell when the ball was in, and made the intake go back to 'carry' by itself?

We did use a sensor to tell us when the ball was in, but that didn't eliminate the problem of the ball unseating itself, getting defended against, or otherwise losing grasp while going back to "carry". A more complete solution would have to constantly react to the current state of the ball throughout the back-to-carry maneuver, because the likelihood of losing the ball with our grabber was too high.

My point was that the way we designed our ball carrier didn't match the automation we tried to use, not that automation shouldn't be done on ball pick-ups. Because our back-to-carry maneuver was so slow (on the order of couple seconds after first acquiring the ball) automating that portion made no sense.