Thoughts about future autonomous scoring...

[bear24rw]

Alot of our teams robot functions were autonomous.. the whole arm was pretty much autonomous, press a button for which height and it rasied the tower, extended the arm and set the wrist.. it was all handled by 2 functions which we used in both user and auto mode. We also had dynamic braking where if you held the four buttons on the drive joysticks the RC would put the brake on the speed controller and it would try to keep its place with the encoders on the wheels, so that was autonomous, again we used the same function for automode.

I agree with others, autonomous mode is something that seems attempted by few. This years was pretty hard, and I understand that if you were a ramp only there wasnt really alot you could do, but I would like to see more teams focus on it and trying to make it a priority for their team in the future.

[ericand]

Originally Posted by bear24rw

Alot of our teams robot functions were autonomous.. the whole arm was pretty much autonomous, press a button for which height and it rasied the tower, extended the arm and set the wrist.. it was all handled by 2 functions which we used in both user and auto mode. We also had dynamic braking where if you held the four buttons on the drive joysticks the RC would put the brake on the speed controller and it would try to keep its place with the encoders on the wheels, so that was autonomous, again we used the same function for automode.

I agree with others, autonomous mode is something that seems attempted by few. This years was pretty hard, and I understand that if you were a ramp only there wasnt really alot you could do, but I would like to see more teams focus on it and trying to make it a priority for their team in the future.

The whole concept of autonomous vs automatic functions was hard for the team in general to understand. We used a bunch of automatic function (to raise the gripper to a hight, to score when we were in position), but we could do more. The problem is often one of terminology and understanding.

Once the team understood how automatic functions (during tele-operated mode) could speed up our average time to score, we got a lot more support. Before the concept was fully explained, we got some resistance from people who equated working on automatic functions with autonomous mode and who wanted us to be focusing first on driving the robot.

I think a good set of automatic functions make control during tele-operated mode much easier. They also provide well tested building blocks for autonomous mode functions.

[Brandon Holley]

One reason autonomous isn't as big this year is because less people are going for it.

If no one is scoring keepers, than its not really a big deal if your team doesn't score keepers...but if say 2 out of 3 teams are scoring keepers, then your team might start reconsidering scoring them, EVEN IF they don't mean that much to your overall score....

Just something to think about...

[ldeffenb]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

...EVEN IF they don't mean that much to your overall score....

I beg to differ that autonomous doesn't score much. Rather than considering it to be "just 2 points", consider instead that it "DOUBLEs what I score adjacent to it"!

Lynn (D) - Team Voltage 386 - Winner of 2 Awards for 14 Autonomous Modes

Orlando Regional Xerox Creativity Award
Palmetto Regional Innovation In Controls Award

[efoote868]

Personally, I would like to see a longer, more meaningful autonomous period, perhaps 20-30 seconds, along with a better goal. This year, we programmed an autonomous, but once our robot was in perfect condition, the team didn't want to see us breaking the robot (with several matches, other robots got entangled with the rack, and spent the rest of the match untangling). Hopefully I'll be able to convince them to use it at IRI...

This year, the autonomous (IMHO) looked lucrative, if you got it right, you could place a spoiler on your opponent's side, making it nearly impossible for them to get easy rows. Its just our programmers never got the robot until near the end of week 4, and even then we had to wire, re-wire, and re-re-wire (ending in a nightmarish tangled mess).

Although we didn't get to use autonomous, we did however make the robot much more like a robot... whenever our antlers were empty, it would turn on its kicker wheel, and be ready to pick up tubes... when it got a tube, it automatically went to the previous height specified... when it got near the rack, it popped the tube onto it. Next year we'll do that... and hopefully for years to come we'll do that.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by efoote868

Personally, I would like to see a longer, more meaningful autonomous period, perhaps 20-30 seconds, along with a better goal.

Agreed.

One thought that I intend to start working into Potomac Vex League scrimmages is giving robots an uncontested field for X seconds and seeing who can score the most points in that time.

Insert the word autonomously into the paragraph above, squeeze the action into the breaks between regular matches or do it during an evening (sort of like the home run derby that occurs outside of baseball's All-Star game) (or install a second (half of a?) field at each regional (Yikes!)), and you have decent reason to give out an award called "Autonomous High Score".

Blake