Autonomous / Hybrid - Tethered versus Radio?

[Shue]

Hi!

We do use the gyro during teleop mode (and hence do process the gyro data in the teleop_spin), and it seems to be working ok there. The bias calculation (we are using Kevin's default code) occurs during the disable-mode handling. One of our experiments was to assure we weren't losing the bias value by calculating it just before a match and hard-coding it in the gyro initialization. Not a perfect solution, but it showed that the bias value calc (or lack of it) wasn't causing the bad robot behavior...

The IR commands were suspected early, as one of our IR commands was "turn left 30 degrees". We disabled the IR handling (disabled the sensor in hardware, as well as removing the code that looked for the IR and processed the commands). We ran that way for a couple of matches, and the hard left turn was still there...

As for distance calculations, as I mentioned, we use geartooth sensors on both our wheels. Our autonomous is implemented as a state-machine that runs discrete functions used to "play the game". These are things like "go straight", "turn 90 right", "turn 90 left", "delay X seconds", "raise lift", etc. These are called in a specific order and with lane-specific values to traverse the track. The straight function sets up the distance and heading desired, starts the wheels at the desired speed, and polls in the 26.2ms loop for completion. Part of setting up the distance is the resetting of the distance counters. We suspected this early as well, so we did a lot of tracing on this (but of course, it works on the practice floor ).

The suggestion to put out the distance in the user bytes to display on the OI is an excellent suggestion! We will implement that for testing during the practice rounds at the Buckeye Regional. That should give us enough info to either identify it as the culprit or remove it from suspicion...

We even went so far as to discuss the issue with the IFI representative at the FLR. They went back and looked through the data they keep, and noted no dropped/corrupted packets to our radio modem. I didn't really suspect that as a cause, but needed to cover all bases looking for clues.

-Mike