How fast is fast to get on the hill?

FIRST General Forum
#57

Hmmm… I am surprised at all the talk, and no one really willing to give a number.

When we tried out our autonomous programs, we were able to get up to the bins in about 4 seconds. We didn’t formally time it. We used several different methods, but the four seconds is running at half speed or less for accurracy until you are lined up on the ramp. Then we accelerate to go up to the stack. Oh, BTW we are only an 8 ft/sec 'bot.

And yes, if you hit the stack low and fast it sends many bins the wrong way. If you hit the second bin high and not too fast, the entire stack tips over the way you want it to.

My question is… Now that you and three other robots are jammed into the space at the top of the ramp with ten seconds left in autonomous, whatcha gonna do now? Frankly, we haven’t decided for sure whether we should let ourselves get caught in that tangle.

I think the swing arm aproaches are great, and avoid other problems. My only question for teams doing that is what happens to your crank when your swinging arm encounters a stopping force. It is one thing to test a swing arm against bins, and entirely another to test against bins being pushed the other way. I am curious whether anyone actually tried that.

DPC.

#58

*Originally posted by David.Cook *
**I think the swing arm aproaches are great, and avoid other problems. My only question for teams doing that is what happens to your crank when your swinging arm encounters a stopping force. It is one thing to test a swing arm against bins, and entirely another to test against bins being pushed the other way. I am curious whether anyone actually tried that.

DPC. **

Good question. We went to the Chatsworth Scrimmage with our “swing arm”, but our opposition in those matches didn’t reach the top in time to oppose our arm. We will have to wait for the Arizona regional to find out what happens when a really fast robot, or another arm like Team 234’s, pushes against our arm rotation.

Team 234 will be competing this weekend at VCU, and although their arm is very different than ours, I am sure our team will be interested to see how their arm does in actual competition.

#59

our bot is 6fps and hits the ramp in 4.034 seconds.

we have yet to see how this works out

#60

We have tested and repeated several times now and we get to the top in an average of 2.2 seconds. Our fastest was 2.0 and our slowest was 2.4 (averaging all the trials). When I say the top I mean contact with the bins. We stopped the time as soon as the robot made bin contact. We have an identical practice bot and are tweaking, because my calculations show we should be at 1.9 seconds. I know what you’re thinking, but let me just say this: I used differential equations to model the behavior of our robot on this year’s playing field and so far everything except the final time is mapping within a few percent.

-Paul

P.S. - we don’t want to be king of the hill, just king of the bins.

#61

*Originally posted by Paul Copioli *
**We have tested and repeated several times now and we get to the top in an average of 2.2 seconds. Our fastest was 2.0 and our slowest was 2.4 (averaging all the trials). When I say the top I mean contact with the bins. We stopped the time as soon as the robot made bin contact. We have an identical practice bot and are tweaking, because my calculations show we should be at 1.9 seconds. I know what you’re thinking, but let me just say this: I used differential equations to model the behavior of our robot on this year’s playing field and so far everything except the final time is mapping within a few percent.

-Paul

P.S. - we don’t want to be king of the hill, just king of the bins. **

I just looked at a picture of your robot. I am amazed that you can get to the bins so fast. How do you avoid tipping over going around the corner?

If we qualify for the championships and meet up with you in Houston, I hope we are on your team.

#62

Originally posted by ahecht
190’s robot should be able to reach the top in 3 seconds this year. Control won’t be a problem either. I can’t say much more than that.

Control won’t be a problem? I watched the videos from UTC matches it looks like you need a lot of help. Not once did you make it to the top under the auto mode.

You might make it to the top in 3 seconds but it has not happen yet.

And by the way it looks like if someone puts a bin in front of your robot the robot does not do well.

I see you are a little top heavy. Having a robot be able to flip you now is not a good thing.

#63

*Originally posted by Mike Norton *
**Control won’t be a problem? I watched the videos from UTC matches it looks like you need a lot of help. Not once did you make it to the top under the auto mode.

You might make it to the top in 3 seconds but it has not happen yet.

And by the way it looks like if someone puts a bin in front of your robot the robot does not do well.

I see you are a little top heavy. Having a robot be able to flip you now is not a good thing. **

Thanks for the compliments.

Just to let you know, our “INS” was not installed at the UTC scrimmage, we were running off “dead reckoning” - the reason it looked like a bin gave us problems was really because the program was not done correctly.

If you watched all of the UTC matches, you would see that in our final match we were able to successfully get to the top of the ramp under autonomous, in low gear.

If you are going to post something negative about a robot, at least have correct information.

Thanks, looking forward to seeing everyone tomorow at BAE

Tom

#64

I’m good friends with a member of 190, and as he explained several things not just ins were not in order. they weren’t truly topheavy, but their wing mechanism wasn’t collapsing as designed. WPI has an excellent robot, and it’s fast, however… I do think that 3 seconds is overestimating yourselves again. Chris said about 5 seconds.

At the UTC scrimmage they took 10-12 seconds in dead reconing, and were the only bot to knock down ~70% of the stack. They were ahead of many teams even then.

871 is in about the same time range of 5 - 5.5 seconds.

Great job guys, i wanna see this INS in action. and how you guys did that after or at houston.

#65

The bot from Oakwood (Ralph II) should be able to get to the stack in about 1.5 seconds based on previous testing before shipping. We dont have to move so we dont have to be horribly fast. We should be able to knock down about 80% of the boxes if we measured angles correctly. Anyways, hope to see a lot of you at SoCal. Peace.

#66

Our robot uses dead reckoning and makes it to the top in 3 seconds and can knock about half of the totes into our scoring zone. We were able to see this happen at UTC but our program was not quite finished so we didn’t get as many boxes as we had hoped.

How many people are actually able to get the top in under 5 seconds, and are you using line tracking or dead reckoning to get to the top?

#67

DougHogg,

It looks like we are top heavy, but in fact 95 lbs (including battery) of our robot is located below 9 inches. The framework above is basically aluminum tubing, with the exception of one motor.

We have steering wheels that control our circle diameter and dynamic wheel speed control to slow down the inside wheels based on steering angle. This reduces the amount of skid that our robot has when cornering.

-Paul

#68

wow, anything under 3 seconds is very impressive

and very useful

my question is, how many autonomous modes work for people?

from what i hear, not very many

#69

*Originally posted by soezgg *
**wow, anything under 3 seconds is very impressive

and very useful

my question is, how many autonomous modes work for people?

from what i hear, not very many **

We estimate we get there in about 4-5 secs. Our dead reckoning auto mode works perfectly on a scale field (with the correct surfaces) but has not been tested in actual competition. We will know in less than a week.

#70

We have 7 fully functional autonomous modes that have been tested but werent perfect when we shipped due to the lack of a full field to test on. our last one is in its final stages right now but we wont know if it works till next Thursday at the UTC competition.

#71

So, how are on-the-ramp times looking after the first real day of competition?

#72

Here is what I can tell you from the NASA/VCU regionals.

We were lucky to have a fairly repeatable dead-reckoning auton mode. We hit the ramp pretty consistently in about 5-6 seconds, although, I must admit that due to the nature of competition I never thought to time it - we had more pressing concerns. Many teams had similar time. Maybe 3-5 were faster that we, and then there was 234 with that incredible arm. (great job 234!!)
[we actually had one match where we hit the stack about a half second after 234 hit the stack with there arm from diagonally across the field - they got more bins than we did from that start]

There are also about 20% of the teams with very slow auton mode, but many were still effective.

If I had to sum up, it was only in the elimination rounds where you really started to see more than two robots hit the stack early in auton mode. Also, it is my opinion (quite the opposite from my original thoughts 6 weeks ago) that getting all the bins early does not correlate with winning the match. There are a multitude of small bots that can push bins around, and many were flying out of the field just due to impact.

We had incredible luck, a great driver, a very tough bot and two remarkable alliance partners (Props to 388 from W. VA and 395 from the Bronx!!!) and we won the finals.

All I can say is strap in tight, it is an incredible game!

#73

Most robots at the St Louis regional had ineffective autonomous modes. My team was slightly better than average when our dead reckoning worked correctly, which was less than half the time. When things went well, we hit the wall in about 6 to 7 seconds and took two or three columns over with us.

The fastest robot, by far, was Team 16 Baxter Bomb Squad. They got to the wall in 2 to 3 seconds and took out 3 or 4 columns, consistently match after match.

And then there is 547. Their robot isn’t any faster than ours, but if it gets there first, it sends the entire wall to its side. A truly awesome sight.

#74

St. Louis was great. thanks to all the teams who helped us the whole way. thanks to team 936 and 476, our final alliance partners who did a great job and should be extremely proud.

we had a very reliable auto. mode. it took about 7 seconds to knock down ALL 29 bins. we knocked them all down 5 out of 8 times during the qualifying rounds. once, team 45 beat us to the hill with a very fast and effective auto. mode. another time, we lost our auto due to our human player not getting back to the mat on time, and once more when our arms didn’t deploy, but thanks to cory, our driver, and amy, our operator, we managed to do great and be consistent the whole time. also our backup drivers, kreig and zach did a teriffic job along with our human player Jess, and mentor, nick. over all we were very successful at St. Louis with a final ranking of 9. we also won a gm industrial design award. I would also like to congratulate the winners, team 171 and their alliance partners.
BBS (team 16) had the fastest auto. (about 2- 3 seconds to the top and another 1-2 seconds to knock down over half the boxes), and the fastest bot, with excellent drivers. there are many other teams that did great and many more that helped us out during the competition and we thank them.

#75

254 consistently got to the boxes in 2.5-3 sec at Sacramento. There were four or five teams that could consistently get to the top in autonomy. Our robot was much slower to the top than expected, but we made it there right before the human control mode kicked in, setting us up perfectly to hit 2 rows, turn and hit some more. Our linefollowing/gyro autonomy earned us the Delphi Driving Tommorow’s Technology award, which made us all extremely happy.

Cory

#76

I’m a member on team 234. I didn’t get to go to the Virginia regional due to a jazz band contest, but I did watch the last qualification round and the finals on the webcast. From what I saw our arm did what we wanted it to do. However, we had a little trouble with dampening the pneumatics on the arm when we threw the elbow out. This cause us to have to wait a few seconds to start the rotation. I think that if we wouldhave had our programmer there we could have made our arm even faster. In the finals we hit the wall about the same time as another robot and that robot took a few of the stacks we were going for. We lost the match! The second match we didn’t play. I don’t know the circumstances of that yet. I will find out on Monday when I go back to school. Maybe at the Arizona Regional we will get our arm working even faster so that no driving robot can get up the ramp at the same time that our arm gets to the boxes.

I can’t wait to see any other great arm bots out there. And I can’t wait to see what happens when we come up against one. I think our arm can take the forces but I am not sure how well. Our engineers are great!!!