Innovation In Control Award Winners

[Tom Bottiglieri]

At regionals, teams are awarded the Innovation in Control award, and given a very basic description of what the winning system was, and how it works. So, all of you teams that won the Innovation in Control award, please post how your system worked and why it won.

[thoughtful]

We(1219) won it in Waterloo. I know we had 6 sensors ranging from hall effect, gyros, e.t.c to IR sensors. We could plot points on a tablet pc then load the program in the robot and have it carry the waypoints out. We were also making sure stuff like our shooting wheel had enough speed, balls werent jamming e.t.c in manual operation. Although we rarely used this due to the fact that our robot can easily stay in its starting spot and shoot, which gave other teams on our alliance a chance to move around. They had overrides for all the systems. However for GTR i know they made even more improvements. I will have our programmer post a full description.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by thoughtful

We(1219) won it in Waterloo. I know we had 6 sensors ranging from hall effect, gyros, e.t.c to IR sensors. We could plot points on a tablet pc then load the program in the robot and have it carry the waypoints out. We were also making sure stuff like our shooting wheel was enough speed, balls werent jamming e.t.c in manual operation. Although we rarely used this due to the fact that our robot can easily stay in its starting spot and shoot, which gave other teams on our alliance a chance to move around. However for GTR i know they made even more improvements. I will have our programmer post a full description.

How did you store the waypoint data?

We loaded our waypoint data into the EEPROM. Our autonomous mode handler parsed the data out of the eeprom and called functions according to the data values we passed into the ROM. This made things considerably easier, because we only needed to compile our C program once, and we made changes on the fly via laptop (we will have a pocket pc for atl!)

Also, we incorporated a serial LCD screen on the robot to spew out diagnostics. This came in very handy when trying to debug the system, and while tuning our control loops.