Do you purposely not score in auto mode?

FIRST General Forum
1

Here’s a question for you out there.

I was in this thread http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=56090 which is talking about auto mode. And then I asked a question that I guess I hadn’t thought of before, but I’m really interested in the answers.

Has your team used an auto mode that has not been designed to score?

Maybe you didn’t have the time / resouces to get the camera working. Maybe you can’t hold the tube very well. Maybe maybe maybe… but you can’t score in auto mode.

Do you do something else?
Open your arm?
Drive out onto the field, getting ready for play?
Drive to the other side to get in the way of the other team?
Knock over tubes on the back wall?
Etc??

Does auto mode always have to be about scoring?

2

Team 190 sets up facing the wall, drives backwards about 3 feet and gets ready to pick up the first HP toss. We deemed this more useful than spending lots of matches and time trying to score and not being in position to score when manual mode starts

3

At the moment we have several untested auto modes except for two.

One that does nothing (it works perfectly!)
And another that just drives forward for a second

We plan on having a couple more for off-season events. Maybe we’ll set the arm to the ground and drive forward, face the robot towards the driver’s station, drive it reverse and set the arm to the ground?

Hopefully we’ll get to actually scoring in auto.

4

We do what I call “smack the rack” defense. We drive backwards and hit a spider foot with our ramp, back up and hit it again.

We are going to have a few more non-camera autonomous modes for Atlanta.

461 has a great mode where they clear out the ringers on the wall to make room for their massive ramps. Fun to watch.

5

We have a telescoping arm that begins the match tilted backwards to fit under the four foot height limit. Our autonomous drives foward, extends the arm into a vertical position and opens our claw to get ready to pick up tubes.

6

During the Bayou Regional team 701 would drive towards the rack, spin a 180, raise the arm, lower the forklift, and at the end the arm would slam down to the ground to get ready to pick up ringers.

7

Gee that sounds familiar - our arm ‘tower’ is hinged, and is tilted towards the rear at startup in order to keep our overall height under 48". In the autonomous period, we raise our arm, drive forward, and then reverse quickly. Inertia carries the arm tower forward, so that it can latch into place in a vertical position

8

This year we(166) didn’t really use our auto but I do know that in past years namely last year we used a defensive auto. We drove straight. Right into a robot shooting for the three-point goal. We didn’t score but neither did the other team.

9

We are close to completing a program that will pick up a ringer on the other side of the field.

The hope is to have the ringer ready for scoring in the first seconds of the match.

10

I devised three autonomous modes:

  1. Start on left side, Drive past the rack, turn right and hit anything in the way

  2. Knock all of the tubes down on our wall

  3. Sit there and look pretty

11

We have a few autonomous modes available. They are all defensive because we can’t score tubes. We can drive straight and then turn left or right depending on which side we started in order to disrupt anyone trying to place a a keeper. We don’t like to use those though. There was one match at WI where we got ourselves stuck on the rack and couldn’t move for the rest of the match. The auto mode do like to use is one that simply drives straight so that we are ready to play defense.

12

We have one autonomous routine which only deploys the arm into position to pick up a ringer from the floor. We used that one at the St. Louis Regional after one of our wheel encoders stopped working and the robot went into a mad spin instead of driving forward as it should have.

We fixed the broken wire and started running the scoring modes consistently at Boilermaker. We still have the “sit and look pretty” mode as an option in case of another encoder problem.

13

The auto mode we used in Boston raised our arm to the top of the player station wall, ready to grab one from the human player. We had a tube in our possession within the first 3 seconds of the match.

14

We turn on our compressor to fill up the air tanks so our pneumatic grabber is ready as soon as the match starts.

15

We zoom back and forth to rock our arm tower into place. The arm tower starts on an angle so we can fit within four feet.

Because of the way our tower is positioned between our lifting platforms, it isn’t even physically possible for us to hold onto a ring at the start of the match. The closest thing to it would be starting with the ring at the bumper, but we didn’t have time to develop a more complex autonomous mode that could go forward, back up, forward again to pick up the ring, and then score.

EDIT: See John Wanninger’s post above too

16

we dri 2 the other side of the field and cover goals to keep other teams from scoring

17

903 had a cool one at Detroit, they drove in a semicircle around the back side of the rack once or twice to stop other teams.

Ours for a while was just drive backwards really slowly. It was a nice setup to get the first HP ringer, but we also tried to use it once to knock into the rack (to stop the other team from scoring their keeper).

18

We have 2 overall autonomous modes that don’t score as well as 2 that do.

  1. Drive to the other side of the rack and drive back and forth to prevent any opposing keepers
  2. Sit and do nothing

We have several variations for our autonomous modes thanks to our autonomous switch.

19

Yeah… we coded one, but the mentors told us not to use it, simply because they didn’t trust it (they thought us having to re-tune our PID code after they changed the friction in the arm was bad coding on our part… also some other things were buggy because we didn’t get all the wires hooked up correctly).

And then after 45 at BMR smashed into the rack and tipped over (a spectacular way to go I might add), they decided that they didn’t want us to break it.

All our robot does is moves its arm down and closes it.

20

We had a programmer spend a lot of time making some autonomous modes but we never got time to test any. we ended up having our robot move the arm into position and open the claw. this let our human player place a tube into the claw right when the match started.