You say that you drive slowly if the goal is not hot. Therefore I assume you have image processing. If so, why drive at all if it isn’t hot? Wouldn’t it be better if you wait until it is hot and then drive?
In that particular case, we ran our 2 ball autonomous but without putting the second ball behind the robot.
Sequence for 2 ball auto:
put arm down
drive forward pulling second ball along
shoot 1st ball within 1st 5 seconds of auto
load second ball
shoot 2nd ball in 2nd 5 seconds of auto
Normally, we wouldn’t shoot again after the 1st ball because we have ball detection that would prevent a dry fire. After we fired the 1st ball and missed, the robot was just sitting waiting for autonomous to end. When the missed ball landed in the robot, we sensed we had another ball and after a little settling time we shot the second ball just as auto was ending.
We do have a 1 ball auto with hot detection but decided not to use it for that particular match.