Scoring Corner Goals During Autonomous

[Cuog]

our teams autonomous also involves just driving toward the center goal but we used a slightly more complex method of driving to it:

we align the robot straight at the goal then i tell the camera to track about where the green light should be once it locks on it drives forward until the light goes out of range, once the light is out of range i will test to see how far it still has to drive to get to the goal and tell it to do that using dead reckoning.

[Safarley2901]

Originally Posted by CronosPrime1

My team is not building a robot with the ability to shoot into the center goal. Instead, we will simply gather balls and dump them into the corner goals. During autonomous mode, we simply want the robot to drive up to the corner goal and dump all 10 starting balls into it.

The problem seems to be that there are no vision lights on the corner goals. There is no green light above the corner goals for sure, and unless I am very much mistaken there is also no infrared source (any infrared beacon) near the corner goals. So, can anyone think of any way of making an autonomous mode that will have the robot drive up to a corner goal? I have heard something somewhere about it being possible to use the infrared sensors to detect obstacles, and thus being able to detect a hole in a wall. Is this true? Is it possible? If so, how difficult would it be to implement?

Also, it has been suggested to me that I could use the CMU cam to look for shapes. Then, I could look for the red or blue rectangle surrounding the corner goals. I am completely new to using sensors: in previous years, our robot had no autonomous mode. I believe that the CMU cam idea will not work because there are lots of red or blue rectangles on the field, for instance the starting positions. However, I would very much appreciate someone else's opinion on this and any ideas on how to implement the autonomous mode I described.

Or you could just put encoders on the wheels and do it that way.

[CronosPrime1]

Oh yes, and if I use dead reckoning, and there are lots of balls in the robot's way, will that be significant enough for the robot to mess up?

[CronosPrime1]

Originally Posted by Cuog

our teams autonomous also involves just driving toward the center goal but we used a slightly more complex method of driving to it:

we align the robot straight at the goal then i tell the camera to track about where the green light should be once it locks on it drives forward until the light goes out of range, once the light is out of range i will test to see how far it still has to drive to get to the goal and tell it to do that using dead reckoning.

I honestly don't believe that will work. You got 10 seconds. Do you really think you can align the robot straight at the goal, drive away, and come back, and then shoot and score some points I assume, all within 10 seconds? Why not use the camera and some basic trigonometry or something to drive toward the light right away and stop at some distance X from the goal? I'm guessing the camera can tell you what angle it's looking at the light from (well, these would be derived from the servo values). Then, using math, you can find the distance. For example, if you know the vertical distance between where your camera is mounted and the light is Y and the angle you're observing it from (derive from servo values) is A, then:
tan A = Y/X (X is the distance you need). So, X = Y/tan A.