New Team Not Using Camera

[Stu Bloom]

Originally Posted by dlavery

... I will be very (pleasantly) surprised if any alliance scores ALL of those points during a match. But it is probably reasonable to expect that 8-15 points will be scored on a fairly regular basis.

Well I hate to be a pessimist (ok ... maybe I don't hate it ) but I will be very (pleasantly) surprised if more than one percent of all robots will be able to cap reliably during autonomous mode. And if you can't cap during automonous then using the camera becomes much less important. Although finding and picking up a vision tetra during automonous will at least have you loaded and prepared to score immediately once the driver takes control.

Originally Posted by dlavery

Given that other threads in this forum have indicated the average expected scores will run in the 45-65 point range, that means that 20-25% of the points may be scored during the autonomous period. If these projections turn out to be true, then sitting there and not doing anything during the autonomous period while your opponent is scoring a like number of points will put you way behind in the match.

-dave

WOW ... I have not seen or heard that 45-65 number ... Again I will be very surprised to see the average over 50. And not to hijack this thread, but I also feel that because of the low scores the penalties are very dis-proportionate to the scoring potential this year. Play clean ... penalties will KILL you!

[Justin Baier]

Our team was tossing around the idea of not using the camera either, but we figured it could help us get over to the automatic or manual loading zone so we're using it. Which is good because otherwise I would have gotten stuck with writing autonomous scripts...joy...

[team1405]

Last year we didn't focus on autonomous and just let our mentors from RIT mess around with it. It wasn't until the championship we tried to get up on the platform during autonomous, but we actually ended up breaking one of our drive chains. Point it you can do it w/o autonomous, and autonomous DOES open you up to some damage with other robots (collisions during dueling autonomous modes aren't uncommon,) but overall you SHOULD focus on the human element and once you have a strategy down for that THEN focus on autonomous mode.

[russell]

Last year we were a rookie team, and we really did not see that much advantage to autonomous. When we actually went to the competition and saw the number of robots that actually had functional autonomous (that knocked the ball off the tee) we concluded that FIRST had not intended it to be that difficult. But when we got picked by another high placed rookie team for the finals, they sent one of their mentors over to help, and he showed us how to write a quick and simple program to drive forward and block another robot from knocking a ball off.

The Moral of the story is that Although the program didnt work perfectly, it still got us halfway down the field, which later allowed us to score 15-20 points we otherwise would not have.

However I do strongly recomend that unless you are on a finals aliance where you know your partners, you should definetly have an off switch for your autonomous program, so you dont risk interfering with your aliance members robots.