Thoughts about future autonomous scoring...

[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.