Rockwell Innovation in Control

[cruddy4]

Originally Posted by smurfgirl

1124 won that award in CT this year, and I think one thing that might have helped is that our programmer made nice handouts with block diagrams to explain how the control system worked to other teams and the judges. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with it to fully understand it or explain it here, but I'll send someone along who can give you the details on what it did.

I'm no programmer, but this is what I know about this subject- acceleration in any direction follows the graph y=x^3, and we adjusted it so that there is no slipping, but it doesnt take a long time to accelerate. We have deceleration on a y=x graph, but theres also a PID loop that measures a floor encoder and a shaft on the gearbox, to compare shaft spin to floor distance traveled. If at any time the floor distance traveled is less than the motor spin, that means its skidding, and the programming will tell the motor to slow down accordingly. The PID loop allows good pushing too- because when being pushed, it virtually eliminates any unnecessary wheel spin, giving the robot nice traction.

Our camera tracks all the time too... For those of you who dont know our robot- its a turret with a camera above it that tracks a trailer and turns the turret accordingly. Sometimes it locks on other trailers we dont want to attack, but we changed manual mode so it turns the camera along with the turret. This way, when we switch back into manual, the camera can lock onto the correct trailer...

[Racer26]

1075 won it at Greater Toronto for our 4wd (1 motor per wheel) 4ws crab drive, 2+2 style steering used in 4 different modes (Car, Monster Truck, Strafe, and Tank)

[team-4480]

So in 2015 and 2016, what did your team do to earn the Innovation in Control Award? I quite curious....

[MikLast]

In 2015 we won it at our district event by having a button that will quickly auto-align to the totes by moving a fork left/right to align the tote to our forks so we didnt have to maneuver around to get the totes, which helped a ton in the early weeks of competition where the scores were a tight 12-4, getting us 2nd qual seeding at that event.

[EricH]

In 2015, we autostacked totes. From detection to waiting for the next tote to come in was pretty much completely automatic, and we had one more tote in the stack when the next one slid down.

[mman1506]

We won it in 2015 for optimized autostacking. We had two IR sensors, one two slow down the intakes once the robot had grabbed the totes to prevent bounce back and another one to sequence the totes.

[Liam Fay]

From what I understand as a non-programmer - the 2485 2015 robot, Valkyrie used the vertical angle of our strongback as feedback to a PID controlling a motor to keep it vertical while the robot went over things.

[dellagd]

In 2016, we won it for-

• Intricate autonomous modes
• Trajectory planning
  • Live setpoint-actual graph for tuning PIDVA loops
  • Both drivetrain and arm motion profiled
• High level of autonomous function
  • Same vision tracking used throughout match
  • Driver instructs robot what to do, not how to do it. Shooter arm is all autonomous, from angle to reloading. The copilot just says to aim and if it is good to shoot.

In 2014, we won it for (starting to forget ):

• Robust software that actually accounted for mechanical failures and could be enabled to adapt in such a case
• Two ball autonomous
• Intelligent robot lighting (using a small coprocessor to drive them) that would alert the driver to robot conditions

In 2013, we won it for (don't remember much ):

• Anti-tip code on a robot that needed to be tippy for our climbing strategy
• Good autonomous mode?

And every year, regardless of the robot, we won awards because our students could convey the robot's functions with clarity and enthusiasm. If you can be really excited about what your robot can do, odds are the judges will too.

[BenjiSG]

We won it this year at the Boston District Qualifier and the New England District Championship for our extremely consistent autonomous and automated vision shooting. Our lead programmer put in a ridiculous amount of work in making sure that our vision tracking (new for the team this year) allowed to consistently make shots anywhere from 4 to 10 feet out.

It also helped that we produced flyers with a write-up of many of the components of our control system, and handed them out to judges who stopped by our pit (see attached PDF).