2008 Arena

[tgraham_533]

Has anyone found the size and position of each of the robot starting boxes?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by tgraham_533

Has anyone found the size and position of each of the robot starting boxes?

In your Home Stretch, not touching your partners, touching the wall. See <G15>, which says:

<G15> ROBOT Starting Positions – Prior to the MATCH, the three alliance ROBOTS must be
placed entirely inside their HOME STRETCH, touching their Alliance Station Wall or the angled fence in front of their local ROBOCOACH STATION, and not contacting any other ROBOTS.

[tgraham_533]

The information I was looking for is the locations of the three starting boxes on the field. We are looking to program an automonous mode and need to calculate the path our robot would have to travel from any starting box to each of the three possible ball locations. The drawings do not show the boxes on the field.

I don't think I missed it in the documentation, but while I wait for FIRST to reply to a question, I thought I would see what everyone else thought. Any help would be appreciated.

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by tgraham_533

The information I was looking for is the locations of the three starting boxes on the field.

There are no boxes. Just the starting position that Eric quoted above.

[65_Xero_Huskie]

Yes, so basically you can start anywhere along your home stretch wall you please, as long as your robot is not touching one of your alliances

[Sunshine]

We used our drafting plotter to print out the field at a known scale. Ours is something like a 24" by 5 foot drawing. Once we knew the scale, we could then make scale models of our robot. Now the programmers could measure distances from different starting locations. This allows them the opportunity to program knowing thatg we will tweak the final configuration later on the actual arena mock-up.

[danshaffer]

Originally Posted by Sunshine

We used our drafting plotter to print out the field at a known scale. Ours is something like a 24" by 5 foot drawing. Once we knew the scale, we could then make scale models of our robot. Now the programmers could measure distances from different starting locations. This allows them the opportunity to program knowing thatg we will tweak the final configuration later on the actual arena mock-up.

This seems like the kind of thing you might want to do in Solidworks or Inventor...

[Ziaholic]

I was also looking for the locations of the 3 boxes ... as our autonomy depends on knowing the starting location. Without the actual boxes, we will probably modify our strategy so our initial conditions might be something like

1) extreme right
2) dead center
3) extreme left

That way, we will avoid alliance arguements during the pre-game setup. We should be able to setup our startpoint in one of 3 positions (via bot switch settings), and be able to remove the ball from the overpass in any of it's 3 positions (via the IR command)

[Jethr0]

i believe that there is no box, just as long as your robot is touching your alliance's wall

[DanDon]

Jethr0 is correct:

According to the 2008 FRC Game Manual:

Originally Posted by GDC

<G15> ROBOT Starting Positions – Prior to the MATCH, the three alliance ROBOTS must be
placed entirely inside their HOME STRETCH, touching their Alliance Station Wall or the
angled fence in front of their local ROBOCOACH STATION, and not contacting any other
ROBOTS.