Controlling Autonomous GamePlan

[nathanww]

The competition sequence goes:
watchdog override->disabled->autonomous->disabled(?)->teleop->disabled

The robot has no problems doing IO to the DS when it's in disabled mode, which is what you see when teams are loading and the field is being set up. Our biggest challenge with using this time period was that that period can be a little hectic for the drivers, since they have to do robot loading, last-minute tactics, and the pre-match checklist.

[Greg McKaskle]

Last year, the DS allowed switch settings through until the mode was enabled. This meant that the right way to use it was to latch the data during disable, and ignore what was sent in enable. I believe that this will now be done for you, and you can simply read the value and during enable, it will give the value from the last disable packet.

Greg McKaskle

[ezygmont708]

Attached is a PDF of what TEAM 708 used this year. It is a binary switch, allowing many autonomous modes to be pre-programmed into the robot and switched depending on competition variables i.e. starting position, game strategy.

The last slide is a list of items needed to put this "Switch Box"

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by nathanww

The competition sequence goes:
watchdog override->disabled->autonomous->disabled(?)->teleop->disabled

The first part of that apparently isn't always the case when using FMS-lite. We didn't spend any time trying to figure out exactly what was going on at CAGE, but our 2009 robot's autonomous didn't run consistently. Its autonomous selection defaults at bootup to "none", reads an analog input from the Driver Station a half second into disabled mode to set the desired routine, and uses that setting as soon as it gets enabled. It also allows the operator to step through the routines using a pair of joystick buttons at any time before autonomous mode is commanded. The currently selected mode is displayed on the bottom line of the DS display. Even though we only had one routine programmed, and the pot on the analog input was locked in place, we discovered that we sometimes had to use the alternate method to force the autonomous program to run at all.

There was enough field-control frustration that day for us to just shrug and do whatever worked.

[Tom Line]

We've used 3 methods.

In '07, we used the user-byte feature to display the autonomous mode in disabled, and indexed the number up or down using buttons hooked to i/o.

In '08, we used the remote control.

In '09, we used the two throttles on our tankdrive joysticks. One was distance, the other angle (fed back through the driver station LCD).

Right now, we've also prorammed a simple count-up / count-down on driver joystick button press so we can use the '07 method on the new control system with feedback through the 2010 driverstation user messages screen. It updates using the same LCD library the '09 one did.