Follow up: How is your auton?

[JamesBrown]

we can knock over the hanging tetras and can sit in place hopefully we will also be able to block the center goal before UTC

[thoughtful]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

Imagine you getting disqualified:

I never said at high speeds , Mostly it does a U at a pretty slow speed. Not too slow though. However, i am sure there will be teams that can correct the pushing/bumps through encoders and gyro. We can our selves account for bumps.

I meant that post as a joke. We would never want to bump into anyone at a high speed, autonomous or no autonomous. Its just not GP. We are rarely going to use that autonomous mode, probably in the play-offs when the allaince has 3 working autonmous modes.

I have a question though, would you guys rather wait till the end (of the autonomus) to drop the tetra or at the earliest moment possible to avoid any bumps. I was thinking that i would want to drop at the last possible second so that we come out owning the goal out of autonomous.

[Kris Verdeyen]

Originally Posted by thoughtful

... We would never want to bump into anyone at a high speed, autonomous or no autonomous. Its just not GP....

It has nothing to do with GP or non-GP, it's just against the rules. It's no more graciously professional to avoid running into someone than it is to build a robot that starts within 28"x38"x60" - it's just the rules. If it were a different game, with different rules (as it has been in years past) then it would be perfectly acceptable to ram into someone at high speeds. It all depends on the context of the game.

That said, and back on topic, our autonomous can (at least) cap a goal with the born tetra and knock down the hanger.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by thoughtful

I have a question though, would you guys rather wait till the end (of the autonomus) to drop the tetra or at the earliest moment possible to avoid any bumps. I was thinking that i would want to drop at the last possible second so that we come out owning the goal out of autonomous.

Consider that the only thing that matters during autonomous is getting the vision tetra stacked. Owning a goal doesn't confer any special bonus at the end of autonomous. I suggest that the best choice is to get there quickly to avoid being interfered with. You can always retake the goal later if you want to.

[Ryan Cumings]

Due to unfortunate mishap with the programming USB->Serial cable (Sabotage by drivering team needing practice?) we had to stop dead short of working perfectly. I'm guessing a late thursday night at the regional.

[JoelP]

due to slow construction team, school bureaucracy, and fedex not being nice we werent able to test our autonomous codes, so they might work, but most probably not.

[Hieb]

After reading these responses I'm feeling better (though not much) about the state of our autonomous modes. We've got 9 unique autonomous modes, switchable depending on which side of the field we're on, but they have never been tested! While we were strapping our robot into the crate yesterday we still had others continuing assembly, so the only autonomous mode that we know works 100% is the one that tells it to sit and do nothing--we can do that reliably.

[tiffany34990]

well--suppose to have it--um dunno-- i have never seen it--it'll be an interesting thursday as usual--perhaps we'll get it perfect before nationals-hee hee

[NotQuiteFree]

We can knock down the hanging tetra 99.999% of the time, and then we go and find a tetra on the field somewhere. Unfortunately, our arm/robot isn't fast enough to pick it up and set it on a goal, even if that is the first thing we do. It just takes longer than the time we have. Oh well, pick your battles.

[Brandon Holley]

Our robot can find the tetra and pick it up. As far as capping it onto a goal, that is what Thursday is all about. We also are making a simple program to knock off the hanging tetra and possibly move to a loading station. I hope that teams can succeed in their auto mode programming. It could cause a big swing in the game.


P.S. - My 100th post ^___^

[Damian Manda]

We have lots of code written for each side starting and center and side goal placement. However, we found that it takes our robot about 9 seconds to lift a tetra to placement height (leaving only 6 seconds to find and aquire and later drop the tetra), so when it came time to test, we only wrote routines to knock the hanging tetra and drive forward, no other placement.

[ldeffenb]

Our autonomous can locate, drive to, pick up, and deliver to the center goal several of the vision tetras (one per match, unfortunately) and do it semi-reliably within the 15 seconds.

If you drop an e-mail to ldeffenb@yahoo.com, I'll send you back a .torrent file that will provide a pair of short video clips proving said claims.

Lynn (D) - Team Voltage 386 Software

PS. For a BitTorrent client, see www.BitTorrent.com or www.BitTornado.com (Windoze).

[elrabin]

I am the only programmer on my team. I came in 2 weeks before the shipping date. We don't have any encoders, sensors, or anything. It is all dead reckoning.

I got the code to knock the tetra down and then just sit there. I decided not to even bother with grabbing the vision tetra because it's almost impossible for our bot to pick a tetra up off the ground...

[zekk55]

Ours operates in 4 modes:
1: Knock left tetra down
2: Knock right tetra down
3: Fly to distance == 2nd autoloader, and deploy
4: Cap any goal we please
5: Do nothing