Shocking!!!

[Todd Derbyshire]

I have seen only one good autonomous mode and that was 190's. Basically they have the capability to hang in autonomous!!

[KenWittlief]

I took us all day friday to get our auton mode 'dialed in' - mostly because the gearheads on our team took up most of our time between matches getting some mechanical bugs worked out, so we did not have any time free to work on the code or sensors

but we did get it working by the last few matches on friday, and it worked in every match on saturday, including all the elimination rounds, except the last one - we were in the finalist alliance and played in the last match, and for some reason our bot did not see the beacon, so we missed the release ball

our bot is designed to collect balls exceptionally well, with a powered roller on the front, and room to hold 4 or 5 balls - I think that teams that focused on hanging in general did not bother to implement much of an auton mode, since they had no real means to herd the small balls anyway

but I did see some teams that were going for the bar atleast move very close to it in auton mode - our finals alliace partner, 211 (Kodak/Marshal) did that

I thought our auton mode was pretty cool - we go forwards using the gyro sensor to stay straight, when we see the beacon out one side we stop and back up a bit, drop our arm down to the height of the release ball, turn towards it exactly 90° (using the gyro again) - move forward to knock it off, back up, raise our arm, turn another 90° towards our drivers, turn the front roller on to capture some of those balls that are now all over the field, moving forwards at full speed till auton ends

its worked great once we got all the angles and distances down- we are looking forwards to our next regional, Buckeye - when it should be working on ALL our seeing rounds, instead of only on the last few.

[Jonathanb]

Thanks for everyone's opinion's! I however think that having an autonomous mode helps out quite a bit. For example, if you release the 5pt. balls during autonomous, it does become a big obstacle for some teams that role right over them tip-seen too much of that at GLR. I was also surprised that so few teams did nothing with the mobile goals or didn't have mechanisms that were able to latch on well?

[Greg Ross]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

I took us all day friday to get our auton mode 'dialed in' - mostly because the gearheads on our team took up most of our time between matches getting some mechanical bugs worked out

That sounds awfully familiar. At that start of the practice rounds on Thursday at Phoenix, we had a single autonomous program (which I knew wasn't going to work, since our IR sensors weren't even hooked up yet.) By the second match, we had our first "working" autonomous program (the ever popular "Mars rock dance".) Eventually we gave up on the IR tracking in order to make weight, but by the start of the finals, we were up to 9 (dead reckoning) autonomous programs the drivers could choose from.

[thewizard16]

I also noticed that auto-mode seemed less-utilized so far this year. It just seems to me that everyone (including us) is having some trouble making their autonomous work right. I know that with having to redo all our programming in a different language this year, (and some design and mechanical delays) we didnt get to working on autonomous as soon as we'd have liked, and therefore didnt get to test all of our ideas. I don't think autonomous is less important, it's just not being used in strategy as much. I think you'll see that change by the time we're at championships and teams start realizing how tough it's going to be, and that those first 15 seconds could really help.

[duckyday]

Originally Posted by SilverStar

Same at the Pacific NW regional.

I saw three auto. modes:

1. Trigger your own ball.
2. Trigger their ball.
3. Push your goal under their ball drop (we came up with this!)

But plenty of teams had autonomous modes.

i saw two other autonomous modes. West Salem and other basket teams manuvered themselves under the ball drop and opened their basket... also my team had a wonderful learn programming mode (we got the Leadership in Control.. YAY FOR US!) which allowed us to program whatever we wanted while we were there... we decided to drive over and position ourselves for the platform... with us i imagine it might of looked like we were trying to knock the ball off, but there is no excuse for missing west salems awesome and effective autonomous strategy!