Has Any Team Been Able to Find and Cap a Vision Tetra in Autonomous?

[gburlison]

Originally Posted by Petey

I was just going to post about this, actually.

Our lead controls mentor was just asking me to crunch some numbers on the subject. We've found that, if you are starting on the side (inside the blue line), and if your robot goes for the first center vision tetra, and if you measure at 90 degree angles assuming a zero turning radius and no time loss per turn, it is a 39.75 foot journey to be able to be in a position to stack on the center goal.

At 7 FPS--the middle ground between our robot's top speed of 10 FPS and bottom speed of 5 FPS--that takes about 5.7 seconds. Call it six, factoring in other problems.

If we assume 5 seconds to grab the vision tetra--not unreasonable--that gives you 11 seconds.

4 seconds to fight your way to the goal and score the tetra.

And that is assuming everything goes perfectly.

For this reason, the mentor will be putting together some serious numbers in an effort to ask FIRST to extend the autonomous mode to 25 seconds.

That is assuming that no one has had an inordinate amount of success with this issue. So, the question is...have you?

--Petey

This is one of the reasons that we are not attempting the vision tetra during autonomous. We analyzed the problem and when our programmers did not think there was enough time in autonomous, we abandoned the idea. To change the rules, 2 days before shipping is not fair.

It is entirely possible that many teams will be able to cap the vision tetra. Those teams should be rewarded for their ingenuity and not have to worry about a competitor who can cap in 24 seconds. It is possible that these teams sacrificed pushing power ( or some other attribute ) to enable their robot to cap faster. If more teams can suddenly cap in auto then it will cheapen the accomplishment of those that can do it in 14 seconds.

It is bad enough that we might have to wait until after the shipment date to have a rule clarified, however to change a clearly defined rule this late in the process should be unthinkable.