Modular Autonomous?

[davidalln]

As nice as fully autonomous driving would be, realistically autonomous this year is a series of drive->kick->drive->kick instructions coded in a linear fashion. However, this game does create some depth in autonomous mode with the introduction of the three zones: you have to program the robot to successfully score whether there be one, two, or three balls near, mid-range, or far.

Therefore, this is the perfect year for a sort of modular approach to autonomous: i.e., the ability to code general functions such as "drive to initial ball" or "turn towards target" or "kick ball" and have an external source such as a text file or an array of variables determine which actions get done in what order.

As for our team, we had three autonomous modes (one for each zone) that each worked successfully. However, especially during elims, modifications needed to be made which caused praying that the code didn't break just because we asked it to drive backwards after kicking the last ball. Therefore, during the next week, we'd love to apply the modular approach I described above. This will lead to faster changes and the ability to easily custom fit our autonomous with the teams we are with in both quals and elims.

Has any other team done this? How did you tackle the problem? It is better just to hardcode three modes?