Simple dead-reckoning autonomous

[gburlison]

Originally Posted by Teched3

Just to help a little in undersanding why so many robots may look as if they are not doing autonomous, I offer the following information:

When the camera is scanning for the light, and can't find it, our robot is programmed to stay put. In my opinion, many of the teams are trying hard to get autonomous to work, and could easily program dead reckoning. However, that's not the challenge - getting the camera to work in guiding the robot to a score is. Winning isn't necessarily related to who scores the most points. Hopefully camera calibration on the playing field will help to make this work. It's how we learn to get better. As an aside, I cannot understand how FIRST expects us to go through our practice matches on thursday without calibration opportunity and a chance to try it out, and then compete on Friday in Qualification matches on Friday on a calibration setting that hasn't been tried on the field.

I agree completely, even after calibration, our camera has a lot of problems finding the lights on the field. Prior to shipping, we almost had autonomous working. Our problems were more mechanical than programming because we were having problems overstressing the gearbox. So here we are at the Colorado Regional and even after calibration, most of the time our camera just scans and it never finds the light. So our robot just sits there scanning until the 15 seconds is over.