Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You

[apalrd]

I would accept your challenge, but I an quite sure the mentors wouldn't like the idea of full autonomy when a human driver can do much better. It all depends on the next game, which apparently the GDC is already working on.... So we just need Dave to add some extra punctuation to his sentences and we can get a nice head-start on the automation.

As for discussion of kicker automation, has anyone seen the Killer Bees robot? We have some automation on the kicker/ball-o-fier (suck button, kick button, distance knob) to result in a kicker recoiling with aprox. feet (nonlinear scaling), kick sequence (reverse ball motor, kill kicker motor, pop clutch, wait, re-engage clutch, restore ball motor, restore kicker motor, wait out rest of 2 second delay). This is all very basic to us. We also have a P control loop on our arm, with a total of 8 different gains to use depending on the loading, direction, and other factors. This is a simple Gain Scheduler, another thing that is very basic to us. Yet, many teams still struggle in software. I have reviewed the code of several local teams and seen that both of them limited themselves to Teleop, Disabled, and Autonomous Independent and/or Autonomous Iterative. They didn't know how to use the most basic of functions, like feedback nodes (One had "Jim the Cluster" that they passed into the main loop so they could use the shift registers), or Enum's (a different team had a bool for each option). Many teams still need to overcome many of the basic programming challenges, so FIRST should not require more automation then these teams can handle. That isn't to say it's not impossible, just something that the game won't require for a long time.