ÜberBots Hybrid Mode (Video)

[Dave Scheck]

First off, nice work. It's definitely not the easiest thing in the world to drive that far with that kind of accuracy, so I commend you for your hard work.

I don't want to stir up a controversy, but I would like to know what people think about this topic. Billy explained the functionality of their robot as:

Originally Posted by Uberbots

We tell it where the balls are with the IR remote, and basically push those positions onto a stack. As the robot makes laps, it pops these set positions off of the stack, and corrects to them using a closed loop driving system.

My question is simply is this legal? My answer is I don't know because I see both sides.

On one hand, I would say this is legal because the action taken when one of three buttons are pressed, the ball location corresponding to that button would be pushed onto a stack. That has the same repeatable outcome every time...a button is pressed, a position goes on the stack. How the robot interprets this is irrelevant.

On the other, I would say this is illegal because based on what I've read in Update 3, an action is something that the robot physically does (I don't agree with this, but it is what it is). For the sake of argument, there are 9 possible actions that are taken (i.e. left then left, left then middle, left then right, etc...). This is clearly more than the 4 allowed actions.

Originally Posted by Team Update 3

What can be contained in the message(s) sent to the Robot? The message should contain a single command that directs the Robot to do something, or provides a single “snapshot” of information about the state or condition of the field that the Robot can use to determine what action to take.

If your buttons told the robot where both balls were at the same time, I would agree that this represents "a single snapshot of information about the state or condition of the field". Queuing up snapshots, I fell, is not a single snapshot because the same button has changed its meaning to represent a different state.

I also see issues with this being a message sequence because the robot's actions are dependent on the order that you press the buttons in. The update clearly says that message sequencing/encoding is not allowed

Originally Posted by Team Update 3

The same would also be true if pressing Button #6 and then Button #7 initiated one action, but pressing Button #6 and then Button #8 initiated a different action. This would be a form of high-level encoding, and is contrary to the intended use of the Signaling Device.

Please don't take this as an attack towards the work that you've done. I definitely appreciate the work that you've put in to make this system actually work. In light of some of the recent rulings at competitions, I think that you should put a Q&A in so that you don't run into problems and have to back out all of your hard work at the competition.