What's your plan for Autonomous?

Competition Rules/Strategy
1

We have a very hopeful plan where we get our alliance mates to simply move to the autozone, then we’ll stack the totes and put all three bins in the autozone in one 13-second sweep. It works fine in the model we made… but we all know how that can go astray.

So, what’s everyone planning to do during auto? Take care of your own bin and tote? Just move the bot? Something bigger?

2

We plan to do the same thing for our primary autonomous routine… We’ll have a couple or three others that will target the totes and RC’s in the center so that we can work with pretty much anybody.

3

We have many possible autonomous modes included in our code… We will choose depending on our allies and change it from our driver station… Here’s a couple of examples :

  1. Move forward (with a selector for the distance)
  2. Don’t move (if we have any problem on the robot or if an alliance wants to do something special)
  3. Take a container and move forward
  4. Take a container, move forward and put it down

And every other possibility you can’t think about… We coded a nice looking dashboard showing which auto mode is in use, its description and where to place the robot on the field…

4

Try to get as many green bins from the center step into our side of the field as possible. Assuming our alliance can stack totes the bins really can add to the score.

5

Use sensors to collect data about the surrounding environment, then discard it and drive into walls.

2 Likes
6

You downgraded to that? Last time I heard you skipped the whole collecting data and discarding it to just drive into walls. More efficient that way.

I think we’re going to be moving. Not sure exactly what we’ll be moving…

7

score points.

8

This read like an old spotlighted post.

Anyways, we plan to a set of switches to select between modes. While I’m not the programming team, I think/hope it will include:
do nothing
drive forward
grab a tote or container and drive it to the auto zone
grab the three yellow totes for a tote stack after our partners move two recycling containers out of the way (maybe, this is kind of a stretch goal).

9

We do plan to have multiple autonomous routines, so we can adapt to our alliance.

  • The simplest is basically the same as the “mobility bonus” from last year - just drive forward a fraction of a second.
  • The main one is to build a 3-tote stack and carry it into the auto zone. We’re already planning a largely automated “align/stack/lift” bottom-stacking routine for tele-op using a pair of Sharp optical range finders, a string potentiometer, the camera, and touch sensors on the lift; the algorithm should work equally well for grey and yellow totes. To score a tote stack, we just need to dust off our old reflective target code and use it to get close enough to each yellow tote to make the A/S/L work. We start behind the right tote (as viewed from our alliance wall), A/S/L, back up, drive to the next, A/S/L, back up, drive to the last, A/S/L. Then, to get everything into the auto zone, we spin 180 degrees (we have a gyro) and drive forward until our “curb feelers” find the back scoring platform. Then we back up a few feet, drop the load, and back away a bit more.
  • More TBD. Our grabber should be good at getting a single RC, but not at moving all three, or at getting them from behind the landfill, so we just add some minor variations, such as a tote stacker that works on the alliance wall side rather than the step side, and a driver that also takes advantage of the curb feelers.
10

We have 2 modes this year.

  1. drive forward (push a bin with us?)
  2. grab bin 1, grab 3 yellow totes and stack, set bin 1 down (not tall enough to put on top of the stack)
11

We plan on doing a 3 tote stack and 3 container set then pull all 4 containers off of the step and line up at the HP station for our full field stacking mechanism. And that’s just the first 5 seconds of autonomous. :rolleyes:

12

And then, the robot builds ten stacks of grey totes and, during the last seven seconds, it deploys a wall to block incoming litters…

13

Sounds like you’ve had a rough day at work recently.

14

We took a really bold strategic decision to spend our autonomous period making contributions to our alliance’s efforts to get high scores.

1 Like
15

Wow how did you know? :ahh:

16

In Auto we’ll start by boiling tea and warming up crumpets using our always-on compressor. There is nothing that says ‘gracious professionalism’ like making brunch for your opponents.

17

Our plan is to start our 3d printer right at the beginning of autonomous so that the robot finishes printing with enough time to stack all the yellow totes.

Yes, we are 3d printing all of the ICs as well :slight_smile:

We use our flux capacitor in a non-traditional manner to speed up the chemical and physical reactions occurring in our robot and 3d printer allowing us to print a robot complete with electronics in under 5 seconds leaving us 10 seconds to stack the yellow totes. We decided it would be too ambitious and unrealistic to stack the gray ones as well

18

Robot uses 16 MiniCIM based quadcopter to float above auto zone and uses portal gun to stack all 3 yellow totes and get 3 cans into auto zone from step.

20

if you are completely able to take ALL of the totes have everyone take their robots to the auto zone completely out of the way. score the points… good strategy?:confused:

21

Do u got it working cause i want to see a video of that. Cause i will be impressed by it.:yikes: