Many teams are talking about putting a camera on their robot and calling it good for autonomous/sandstorm. Because our team doesn’t have the best luck with cameras, we’re thinking about combining teleop code in autonomous code to make adjustments in auton or just completely take over if the auton goes wrong.
What are your ideas for autonomous programs this year? Completely through the camera? Completely autonomous? A combination?
For 2989, we are planning on using a camera and teleop drive as our primary method, but we will have a backup autonomous program ready at the press of a button in case our cameras stop working. We will also likely overlay vision targets onto the camera for our drivers to make it easier for them to find what they are looking for. We have also thought of using a semi-autonomous approach, where we use cameras to help us drive but still have vision-powered commands for shooting cargo or placing hatch plates.
I’m certain some teams will probably use full auto (likely with some pathfinder software similar to what 254 has), and they might be slightly more successful than teams that use teleop, but either strategy will probably work and having both teleop/autonomous available is likely the best strategy.
1777 will probably go with semi-autonomous gameplay for the entire match. Moving around will be done by the driver, but autonomous commands will be used to align with vision targets to place hatches and shoot balls. There isn’t a lot of room for error for placing hatches or shooting cargo into the rocket, so computer assisted aiming will be much more accurate for those activities.
We’ve had some bad luck with cameras in the past, but I trust that we can make it more reliable this year. Putting the vision processing on a separate device (Jetson TX1 with its own camera) will help with this, so we probably won’t have any issues with running the autonomous commands if the camera stream to the driver station fails. In the worst case scenario where our driver station can’t get a video feed at all, we’ll just blindly drive forwards for a few seconds during the sandstorm to get off of the platform and wait for the screen to go up.