Tweaking & Testing
It feels like the season just started, but here we are less than a week from our first event of the year. On Saturday 2/18 our team will be one of 30 teams at the official Week Zero Scrimmage hosted by Team 811 The Wild Cards. Good luck to all teams attending or hosting a scrimmage!
To prepare we have been busy working on many small adjustments to the robot, making our first set of practice bumpers, and automating routines on the gold robot. More updates will be in the next software post.
Yesterday we took our gold robot and alpha robot to WPI to test on a full field. WPI has gone above and beyond supporting the New England community by providing a full practice field for teams to use. This included having a real Charging Station made providing some ideal access to tune some auto balancing routines before hitting an official field. As a COTS swerve team using SDS MK4i modules we were very curious how our robot would handle getting the ramps of the Charging Station down during auto consistently and if an active mechanism may have been needed.
We started tuning our Auto Balancing routine we made on our wooden Charing Station at home. It worked pretty well and we did some tests if another robot was stationary while a driver ran the routine.
Since our robot is very light (under 100lbs) the gold robot had a hard time driving onto the station if Alpha was already balanced on it. One time we came at an angle and it did get up but didn’t seem consistent. Once it was on the ramp, auto balancing could do its thing. We didn’t drive Alpha around because we didn’t have bumpers made so we didn’t test two driving on at once.
Next we moved into basic autonomous routines and played around getting a simple L3 Cone + Mobility and L3 Cone + Auto Balancing made. These we feel are satisfactory for next weekend and will let us move to other tasks.
There’s still more work to be done making tweaks to speed things up, work on inverting for Red/Blue, and slowly get the Mobility routine closer to a Staging Mark to plan to set us up for picking up a game piece. You’ll notice the auto balancing sequence stopped working halfway through this video. After we did some teleop practice we started increasing the drivebase speed and the changes started to impact the auto balance routine we had tuned. By the end of the video near the end of the day we got it working.
These auto routines worked with minor tweaks with no adjustments between the wooden and real versions. We were very excited about this since again we were worried if our robot would be consistent on a real charging station. For any teams wondering about our clearance the bumpers we used in the video are 1 ⅝” inches off the floor and using a slicker fabric VX21 X-Pac Fabric.
Next we did some much needed cycling to work through the setpoints we had been tuning in the Grid and Double Substation.
In these videos the drivebase top speed was limited and some other things like the Cardinal Direction Control had not been fully tuned. We also swapped a few different drivers and one of the Cone pegs wasn’t 100% stable causing some misses in auto. The good thing was it proved our robot can do what we intended it to do with scoring and pickup. We have long list of improvements to things like our sequencing, speeds, and handling of game pieces to not lose them so easily. The ground intaking isn’t groundbreaking, but we knew that when we made the decision to use the wrist and basic claw vs. dedicating a whole mechanism which is in the works. More on this later.
Something it did show was the importance of the driver and operating communicating to ensure all arms in the robot are stowed before leaving the Community or Loading Zone. A trick we found was if you hugged the wall in and out of the Loading Zone you can extend your travel time in a safe space if you need to extend out two sides. Traffic patterns will be very interesting in this game coordinating 2-3 robots on each alliance needing to move in and out of these areas and crossing traffic with your opponents.