2009 Control System Possibility?

[Dave Scheck]

Originally Posted by Danny Diaz

Actually, it was. 418 was the only team at the Lone Star Regional that could, in autonomous, repeatedly grab the magnetically hanging tetra and place it on top of its stand. It was incredibly cool, the team worked on that one aspect for almost an entire day.

Autonomous is what you make of it given the tools you have available to you. The biggest problem in my opinion is that the tools we currently have are lacking.

-Danny

OK, credit given. We (111) worked extremely long hours and were able to reliably cap the center goal with a tetra that was in most of the positions on the field....with our practice bot. On the competition bot, things drove a little differently and we were very close on multiple occasions, but ran out of time. I can't seem to find the video, but there was one occasion at champs where time ended with the tetra hovering centered over the goal. It was exciting to watch, but resulted in no points.

With the exception of 111, 418, and a small handful of other teams, the majority of teams didn't move enough to be noticed. That's what my original point was...autonomous was boring the majority of the time.

I also say "It's a poor workman who blames his tools". We (and I know we're not alone), use the controller to the fullest almost every year. In 2005 we offloaded the camera processing to our custom circuit, but the logic of doing something with the data resided on the RC, and let me tell you, it took a lot of math to figure out where we were going. In 2003 we had a waypoint system completely in PBasic.

Yes, with more advanced hardware the potential of what can be done with it goes up, but the current hardware can be made to work. Are you telling me that an arbitrary rookie team with no programming experience would be able knock two balls down and do 5 lines this year had the controller been more advanced?