Hi all!
We are a team-based out of a garage (bay area) and are having a slight bit of trouble with testing autos as the ground isn’t completely flat and the area is small. We looked into taking our robot to a public school tennis court but realized this is extremely inefficient as we would have to transport the 20x10ft carpet we have every time.
Has any other team had luck with a solution like a foldable stage or similar?
Thanks!
Optionally you could test on the tennis court without carpet the first few times to make sure your auto “appears” to be doing things correctly, then take the carpet out for a spin once the obvious bugs are gone.
So the issue with not using the carpet is that we are using swerve with carpet wheels and those get messed up really fast. The auto appears to be decently good on the driveway but we wanted more space and consistency.
Very often there are teams in the area with a practice space that are happy to share if you reach out to them. That’s what we’re doing, since our space only holds a 1/4 field and the ceilings are too low to be able to launch the balls this year.
We feel your pain.
A couple of things that have worked for us:
For a couple of years we had “friend of a friend” access to some vacant office space. ceilings were low, but we could tape out key dimensions and test auto paths.
If you can dedicate a long day to just auto tuning that makes the relocation costs more palatable.
We have laid out carpet in the parking lot in a pinch (and dry weather.) Not great, but …
We have had afterhours classroom access through a kind teacher. But clearing space, and resetting the room after each use was a time sink.
Sometimes putting out a specific request to friends and family will turn up something: “we are hoping to use a 20X20 carpeted space for a couple of 5 hours blocks.” Not shooting opens up more possibilities.
(Always use bumpers in borrowed space. It’s embarrassing, and not particularly easy, to fix someone’s drywall. Still stings.)
Yeah, that would be amazing! Would love the opportunity to share an area, or meet other teams in the Bay Area once in a while through something like that; the regular gameplay that would occur would probably also raise the bar for both teams competitively in the matchplay that would result, and furthermore, we would probably get the opportunity to meet a ton of other really cool people from different teams.
We’re in San Jose, and have carpet and space to set it up. DM me and we can figure something out 
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.