So it seems a lot of teams go straight and hit center…any one see a good camera autonomous…?Or anything diifferent?
You might want to take a look at Team 40’s autonomous mode.
79 KRUNCH (most amazing alliance partner ever, had a great one. They would lock on to a target until teleop and then dump first thing in teleop. One of the reasons why we were the #1 and #2 OPR teams at the regional, after Friday. Woot!
The Martian twins (70 & 494) use the camera to find, approach, and score 7 rocks in autonomous (very impressive).
We can pick up from the floor or receive rocks thrown from a PS. In autonomous we often drive from corner to corner and let the PS top off the hopper. We may try picking up an empty cell this weekend (but don’t tell anybody - they’re not even supposed to notice).
Then theres the tight spin, first done (that I know of) by BOB (85) at Traverse City on week 1 and now copied by many others (including us!).
Personally, I don’t see the point of going straight. It just puts you in the scrum and makes you a target.
easy to do, and better than nothing!
904 scored in autonomous a couple times in Traverse City.
We now have 2 “tracker modes” where we look for an opponent. One primarily looks to the left, the other to the right.
We also have the drive and “sit n spin”, along with a plethora of drive turn an angle (using gyro) and drive some more.
There’s a huge advantage to going straight, especially if your autonomous didn’t work for about 3 matches before that. We noticed a huge difference in the rocks scored on us, even if we did end up scrumming in the middle. My personal favorite mode to watch was the teams who positioned themselves to turn and pin the robot nearby
Better than going straight is to go out a little bit and spin like crazy, preferably in the long-range zone (i.e., about halfway in between your opponents’ outpost and their home/remote fueling station). Now they have to deal with both distance and an oddly moving target.
Straight may not always be smart, but it sure is fun. CLASH:yikes:
We did do this at the Midwest regional because we had not tested out code enough to use it in a competition. We the re-evaluated and found that there was little gain. We crashed :ahh: into a bunch of other bots, causing us to damage our bot and the human players in the middle still scored on us. We rewrote out code to allow different options, via a switch on our bot that allows us to go to one of many pre-defined points on the field.
One thing that we discovered early on in the competition season is that any type of autonomous that relied on timers, encoders, etc to get to a certain point at the field was pretty much doomed to fail due to the huge conglomeration of robots that build up in the middle. Hitting that might be effective defensively, but not offensively(you can’t score or collect moon rocks)
We have two basic autonomous modes–in one we head over to our player station or outpost to have balls loaded in, and use the camera to do obstacle avoidance. The other is basically the reverse of that–we track someone down and fire into their trailer during auto.
Using team 330’s follow the bot code we are able to track and score in autonomous but our code executed so slowly it didn’t score very often so now we’ve changed to just going straight. Risky? Yes but a lot of fun to watch 
We’re tweaking things for Atlanta though so we don’t kill our bot more than we have to.
I remember a thread like this a while back, but I will contribute to this one also 
My team (The FEDS) have used a spinning action where we go out and spin in a circle. It has been very effective and we still use it today. Also it was not 85 who pioneered this, but us. I would know, I was there in week 5 of the build season when we wrote it. If I cab find a video of match one at Traverse I will be able to show you the first offical match where it was used.
We have also adapted your spinning autonomous, after me move away from the human players and walls, It works pretty well.
The HOT teams auton drives over to the airlock and gets filled with balls, both fulfilling a evacuation from the human player and making themselves more lethal for teleop.
I have also seen many teams rive to there middle outpost and get or get ready for and empty cell.
team 1086’s autonomous mode drives by our outpost and picks up an empty cell…i believe 365 does too
They can track from their cameras. It seems effective for moving, but I’ve noticed some troubles when moving in teleoperate as to tracking.
There are robots that use the autonomous period to obtain empty cells (such as 217) and there are robots that use the autonomous period to load their robot up with moon rocks so that they have ~20 moon rocks to score by the end of autonomous. There are a lot of strategies that use the autonomous period in a constructive way.
WAY TO TELL THE WORLD WAYNE! YOU MAY BE THE RULER OF WAYNE’S WORLD BUT NOT OF OURS! KEEP OUR SECRETS SECRET!!! 
I’ll have to admit that our robot just drove straight out and did a slight right-turn to keep jams from getting too tight. (It also helped for pinning robots to our outpost…)
I did talk to someone from 234, and from what I understand, they have written a program that allows them to draw a line on a computer, and it compiles code for the bot to do the same thing. They really did seem to do well in autonomous…
Spinning hasn’t seemed that useful to me unless you have a robot that can really build up some RPMs. If you’re not spinning very fast, the PS just starts timing the spin and tossing moon rocks in anyways. I saw a PS at LSR that would grab two rocks at a time and toss them when the trailer swung around, then grab two more rocks, wait… It certainly makes life more difficult for the PS, but it doesn’t really make scoring impossible.
A better plan starting in the corners is to pull a slight turn into the long wall and drive to or just past your outpost. If you’re a tall robot and you pull your trailer slightly past the outpost, you’re nearly impossible to score on. The PS you started in front of is unlikely to make a half court+ shot, the PS in front of you isn’t likely to score over the top of your robot, and the outpost PS isn’t going to have the range or the vision to score over the mass of robots in center field. Granted, you’re in trouble if the robot in front of you doesn’t get out of the way, but he’s going to be in more trouble in that case anyways.