There seems to be a lot of hype about our autonomous mode in the Finals matches. We used two robots to feed balls into a third shooting robot. Here’s the best video showing it:
Honestly, watching that autonomous mode work so perfectly was amazing. I felt like I did last year the one, and only one, time that our minibot worked.
Here’s a more technical description of the contraption:
3322’s robot was unique in that the shooter was on the opposite side as the collector. The alliance was arranged with 3322’s shooter facing the goal, 3601 touching at the back with collectors aligned, and 862 to the side of 3601.
For the first 3 seconds, 3322’s shooter wheel accelerated up to speed.
3322 then began to feed balls into its shooter, which shot at the top hoop.
a second or so later, 3601 began to feed balls into 3322 by running its collector backwards, where they were then scored.
A few seconds after that, 862 used our side-facing shooter to shoot balls at low speed into 3601’s open top, where they were then fed into 3322 to be scored.
That’s just AWESOME! This has totally inspired me to make 2 whole new autonomous routines! Thanks for sharing this! (my programmers probably won’t be too thankful, but that’s just programmers. ;))
This was amazing. The only thing I didn’t like about it was that our last shot usually only counted for 3 points. I think that if we shot a ball in autonomous, it should count the full 6 points. Otherwise, we actually have less than 15 seconds to do what we need to do in auton. Someone on my team found a Q&A question from 1114:
“If a robot releases a ball prior to the timer hitting zero during the hybrid period, but it completely passes through the top hoop after the timer hits zero, will this ball be worth 3 or 6 points. What is the determining factor? Time of: release, passing through the hoop, passing by the sensors?”
Answer is in pending state
So it looks like we found out the answer today. I am not a fan of this small quirk of the game because it gives us fewer than 15 seconds to complete our task.
These is usually a 1-2 second pause between autonomous and telop that would make up for this, but they seem to have shortened that pause this year. Maybe they could add a little more time or actually pause the game until a ref hits a button saying that everything has settled (I think this has been done in previous games).
I had thought of this during the beginning of week 6 and took a sample pic of such a setup.
Glad to see it work to fruition at a week 1 event and many more to come for sure.
Reminds me of 2009 when the HP fed 217s robot during auto mode.
A video I recorded (up to 1080p on YouTube!) of us testing out the autonomous code a few minutes before we had to queue. Team 862 deployed a fix to the time issue that is visible in this video on the way to the queue.
We tried a two team version of this in a qual match with 1528 at Gull Lake (we also collect and shoot from opposite ends), but without success. Hope to try again soon.
I thank the announcer at Waterford for alluding to this Hybrid Mode during what I believe was a semi-finals match with Team 3601 in it. Congrats Team 3601 for making another finalist appearance.
Glad to see that worked out so well for you we tried this ourselves once in an eliminations match where a team told us they could guarantee they would get all 6 balls in were us and the other alliance that fed them only made both balls in about 50% of the time. They ended up missing all 6 but im not too worried about it anymore nice learning experience for us that we need to teach some of our other members to scout properly