Autonomous Longer????

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by Not2B

If you have a arm all folded up, why don't more people just unfold the arm and get ready for human play. Or move forward onto the field. Maybe you don't have the time to perfect a camera based auto mode - but it's not as hard to "get ready" for game play.

Why not arm unfolding? Because you can do that in the time it takes your human player to run forward and toss the first ringer

Why not move forward? Risk of ringer-ing yourself or an alliance member ringer-ing you on the first toss. You're safer in the 'shadow' of the driver wall.

Why not move across the field and prepare to defend? I saw a few teams get tangled on the rack trying this. In order to avoid entangling yourself, you need the gyros and accelerometers as well as the programming skill to use them, which is nearly as hard as the camera.

I agree it is the skill of the programmer, but also it is the skill of hardware team. We have a very successful auto because we got the robot over a week before shipping date. They set goals to finish early and kept to it. so we had time to work on this hard autonomous game.

Totally agree with this. You CANNOT make an effective autonomous mode from scratch at the competition, unless you have a godlike hardware team. At the competition, there will always be repairs to be done, bolts to be tightened, kajiggers to be lubed and polished. The programming team only gets robot access when all those things are done, which is never. You need substantial alone time with the robot during the build period in order to develop and test autonomous mode, which requires a fast hardware team.