[Official 2007 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions

[Dave Scheck]

Originally Posted by Donut

Why not do it in reverse, and force the teams going after the harder task to do it in less time? Sounds like a better challenge to me.

I disagree...Let's apply some examples of a staggered start system to Triple Play.

I would make the easy task scoring the hanging tetra (either knocking it down or placing it on top). This is a relatively easy task that doesn't need a whole lot of time to accomplish. Look back to when the game was played, and you'll remember that there was quite a bit of downtime after teams hit the hanging tetra.

I would make the medium task be pick up off the autoloader (1 or 2) and score on the side goal. This is more complex than the previous task, but it can be done without fany vision/sonar/etc... systems. Everything you're trying to accomplish is at known positions on the field.

I would make the hard task to score the randomly placed vision tetra on the center goal. This would require some form of sensory system to seek out the vision tetra. Once it collects the tetra, the robot is in a semi-known position. The goal is in a known absolute position, but that would have to be combined with the current position, to determine where to drive next. This makes it more complex.

I would allot 20 second to the hard, 15 seconds to the medium and 5 (maybe 10) seconds to the easy. I think this cuts down on the amount of downtime in the match. Maybe you could go so far as to skip the first 5 seconds if nobody's attempting the hard task.

If you flip that around, you would have a robot that was halfway to picking up the vision tetra at the end of autonomous, and a robot that knocked the hanging tetra down and sat there for 15 seconds. I definitely think that the harder skill would need to be allocated more time.

I think FIRST has hit a good point with autonomous this year; namely that it matters in the game.

I definitely agree with this. Not only that, but large movement was required to accomplish the task, keeping things interesting. Triple Play's hanging tetras required such little movement to accomplish that sometimes you couldn't even tell that the robots even moved.