well, at the start of the season… all you heard was bragging about compases, external processors, teleportation systems and all kind if kewl stuff that teams were gonna use to blow everyone away during auto mode… well, im wondering how everyone is doing now that the build is pretty much complete. everything live up to your expectations? or bomb miserably?
our team is doing very well… makes it up the ramp very nicely using the gyrochip to control ascent and descent of the robot on the ramp. it works better than most of us expected it to!
Being a rookie team, we just dead-reckon our way to the top of the ramp as quickly as robotly possible. Darn, I wish I’d timed us today when we finally got the turning radius perfect…if I had to guess, I’d say maybe 2 seconds. Three tops.
so far our autonomus mode is working just fine and can come out of any of the four starting boxes with out having to change the program plus we can knock over the wall over in about 4to5 seconds.
If everything goes according to plan, our bot should be able to knock down at least 2/3 of the wall in between 1-2 seconds without moving. We are not designed for speed, so we dont exactly want to race up the ramp. We want to stand still and do something to knock it over. Hopefully everything will go according to plan. Hope to see most of u guys and gals at the SoCal Regional.
Auto-mode is getting there. We need to focus on gettnig up to the top of the ramp. We are garunteed to get 26 bins every single time - it’s just a matter of getting up there fast enough. We’re close - we just have some tweaking to do!
We had quite a discussion last night about what to do after we knocked all the boxes down.
Do we sit at the top of the ramp and hope we don’t get run into by another robot still charging up? Do we back up and get out of the way, hoping that we don’t spin ourselves around and fly off the edge of the ramp? Do we keep going foward and meet the incoming robot head on?
We decided the latter. I’m very interested in what other teams decided.
Something you robots working off timing should think about – the robot behaves differently with a less-fully-charged battery. My team found that at 11 volts the robot would do nothing close to what it did at 13 volts.
We ran tests last night, and are quite impressed with the results. We’ve had a program for a while, but last night was the first test with our new robot.
we have been tinkering around with a line tracker… its not as easy as it looked. under a human driver we can get from the starting position to the top in about 3 seconds; but with this line tracker it takes just over 5 seconds just to do the turn. I am to the point of giving up on the line tracker all together and just throwing on a compass and a couple of tachs. -Jacob
*Originally posted by GregT *
**Something you robots working off timing should think about – the robot behaves differently with a less-fully-charged battery. My team found that at 11 volts the robot would do nothing close to what it did at 13 volts.
Greg **
This is true and extremely frustrating. We get it to work and then a new battery comes in and it doesn’t work again.
