[Official 2005 Game Design] Autonomy Discussions

[gburlison]

Originally Posted by Doug G

Many teams this past year, disabled their autonomous or ended up keeping it simple, like drive forward and push the moveable goal (or robot) to the other side. Many teams actually didn't want the balls to fall in Auto mode, since it was often more advantagous to move the moveable goal under the ball drop area and score an easy 4-5 balls.

Our Programming team worked on ideas for autonomous ball release while the robot was constructed. By the time we had robot constructed, the team decided that dropping the balls in autonomous was not worth the possiblity of crashing headon into another robot. We decided to use the strategy of moving the goal and waiting for the balls to drop. At regional competition, we noticed that very few robots had reliable autonomous, so we decided to put more emphasis on dropping the balls in auto. We never really got it reliable at the Championships during practice and during qualification matches we only had one match where the strategy worked out with our partner caused us to attempt to release the balls during auto. Contrast this with the 2003 game where there was not a strategy that involved letting your opponent get to the top of the ramp first.