One of the things that I found to be pretty common during the regional at Philadelphia was teams that lacked the ability to do nothing during Autonomous mode. Whenever that team wanted to skip autonomous in favor of the other teams program, the human player was forced to wait longer than 10 seconds to get back on the pad. The problem is, one must get back in 15 seconds, or suffer some really bad consequences. And to top it all off, everyones worrying about these penalties. This is grief nobody needs. So, all i suggest is that one of your modes is to simply sit there (127 all around). If you don’t have a switch(s), you could just make another copy of your program and download before the match. Anyway, this makes it guaranteed that (given that the human player is fast enough) there wont be an issue if the robot moves or you get penalties. So I think it would be a good idea for teams to have this as an option. What do you think?
This is definately a good idea. We had three switches on our robot: one to select left or right side of the ramp, one to select which auto program to run (we only had two), and the last one to set whether we wanted to move at all. Wiring up a switch takes only a few minutes, and is much easier than re-downloading your code everytime, so I’d definately recomend that teams give it a try.
We tried deactivating autonomous mode by having the human player take longer than 10 seconds, and fo rthe most part it worked, except for one match, where he took 16 seconds!!! Needless to say, that match we got the highest QP’s we had ever gotten, and the second highest in the nation at that time (349 i believe)!
ADVICE TO TEAMS that haven’t attended a regional yet: Make sure to test your program before you get on the field (by tether) while your waiting in line to get on stage. It helps to double check while you can. Each match that we double checked, our autonomous mode worked. All the times we took it for granted that it would work, and those matches we would end up stuck on the railing!
We found that using the human player to disable autonomous was very helpful, because we can be dislodged by someone placing bins in the exact right place. So, if someone puts their bins there, we don’t get back to the mat in 10 seconds.
I think a lot of Philly teams had do nothing autonomous code because there was no place to test out your code safely. I think that FIRST has to plan on having areas to practice safely at each regional. There was a practice field at Annapolis which proved very helpful and provided a safe venue for testing autonomous code. We tried out a piece of code in our pit and almost took out our engineer.
Hmm… we tried practicing our autonomous mode at Philly too. We borrowed a piece of carpet from another team (I wish I could remember the number), and went outside in a clear area to test it (we were just going to be turning 45 degrees in place, so not a lot of room was needed). We were told by a Drexel official, however, that robot teams, contrary to years past, were not allowed to practice their robots on the ground (i.e., it had to be up on blocks, or some other form where it wouldn’t actually move on its own accord). This was due to liability concerns (isn’t everything?).
Anyway, I believe most autonomous testing can be done just by observing the wheels – obviously you can’t get the “exact” values, but in the least a general feeling about “safe” values … and anyway, this is what the practice rounds are for. And if it isn’t done by then, what’s to stop teams from figuring it all out during the actual match? Sure, there’s a need for FIRST to plan to have safe areas to practice out autonomous/ general performance … but isn’t this the practice matches on Thursday? At Philly there were 4 practice matches, and with 2 “matches” each time that means 8 trials of the auton program. That provides a lot of data to get it right, in my opinion.
And to the main point, I think its probably better to try to do ‘something’ than nothing … a simple dead reckoning system can be quickly developed for your robot, and it helps a lot to get a good position in the first 15 seconds of the match. Though, for various reasons, it might be advantageous to have a mode where the autonomous mode does nothing – this, however, is trivial, and there isn’t any real excuse to have to rely on the human player to disable the auton mode. If it’s what you have though, use it to full advantage.
