We did gloves FIRST?

[bigqueue]

Originally Posted by rufu5

Hello, I am Rufus Cochran (rufu5), the electronics team leader for Team Roboto 447. Last season my mentor and I conceived, designed, and built our gloves or "virtural joystics" and won- 2003-MidwestRegional-Xerox Creativity Award, 2003-St.Louis Regional-Leadership in Controls Award, 2003-IRI-Delphi Driving Tomorrow's Technology Award. This system completely replaced joysticks for our driver controls. This year, I designed and built optical joysticks which use a glove that has a high intensity LED on it to control our arm (full precision control that acts like a sensitive joystick)
During the Great Lakes Regional, our team passed out stickers which said "We did gloves FIRST" (which I designed and used as a nice little pun). Two of my fellow students later reported that they were rudely told by two other teams that we were lying and that their teams had done gloves first
I am not doubting anyone, I would just like to know what they are talking about I am only a Sophmore in High School but I have been with my team for 4 years and the only thing close that I have seen was a plastic "hand" that was geared up from a backpack a couple of years ago. I was under the assumption from the judges at Chicago and St.Louis last year that they had not seen anything like this before either. If we did not do "gloves" first, I am truly sorry for unintentionally misrepresenting this. Based on my time with FIRST, and the reaction I got from everyone I showed our "virtural joysticks" to, we thought we were the first team to completely move away from joysticks in driving our robots main drive system and pioneer such a control system. I feel certain that no one has ever attempted anything like our optical joysticks this year (well lol, as of now ).
I would like to know if my light-hearted stickers offended anyone. We will stop giving them out if others have done such a control system before. Again, I am truly sorry about any mix up. I didn't mean to anger anyone with the stickers. We just thought it was something truly original to our team (like wildstang and crabdrive or kokomo and their shifting mechanism from a few years back). I just thought our team could be known for our innovative control systems
Please reply with as much detail as possible so I can know all the facts clearly. I don't want to look stupid spreading false information. I am seriously sorry if I unknowingly made a false statement and feel very bad about even the thought of making such a false statement.

This might be slightly off topic, but how do you use the gloves at the start of the match?

That is, it is my understanding that we can not be touching the control system during autonomous mode.....does that mean that you have the gloves off that that point and then run up and put them on, or are they on, with a simple connector interface that gets plugged in when driver mode begins?

I'm just curious how you handled this sort of stuff.

Thanks,
-Quentin