Our team came up with a concept have standards for the autonomy period of the game and wanted to see what the CD community thought of it. The World Triple Play Autonomous Mode (WAM) Standards would be developed to help teams decide their alliance’s autonomous period strategy. We mainly started to develop WAM so teams would know the search sequence of the vision tetras thereby teams would be less likely to go after the same one. It continued to evolve into writing standards for many of the autonomous moves so all teams might find WAM useful.
This is how a strategy session might go with WAM implemented.
“Why don’t we (#9453) do the BGS/Alpha/CVS move while you (#5843) do the BGS/Beta/RVS move and you (#7298) do the TOC move? Well, we (#7298) are certified in the Beta move so why don’t we do BGS/Beta/RVS and you (#5843) do the TOC move. Perfect, we can do the TOC every time but we don’t do the RVS very well.”
Here are some standards that we sketched out
Note: All positions are relative to the drivers looking at the center of the field
Alpha Standard: Robot starting in the blue left position or red right position shall pick up the first vision tetra found in a starting location in the following order: 3-8-4-2-7-5-6-1
Beta Standard: Robot starting in blue right position or red left position shall pick up the first vision tetra found in a starting location in the following order: 1-6-5-7-2-4-8-3
Charlie Standard: Robot starting in center position shall pick up the first vision tetra found in a starting location in the following order: 2-7-4-3-8
Delta Standard: Robot starting in center position shall pick up the first vision tetra found in a starting location in the following order: 2-7-5-1-6
Auto-Loading-Zone Standard (ALZS): Robot starting in any position shall delay 3 seconds and then proceed to auto loading zone
Meet The Neighbor Standard (MTNS): Robot starting in any position shall “meet their neighbor” without regard to displacing vision tetras.
Left Vision Standard (LVS): Robot shall place vision tetra on top of Left Goal
Right Vision Standard (RVS): Robot shall place vision tetra on top of Right Goal
Center Vision Standard (CVS): Robot shall place vision tetra on top of Center Goal
Bump-n-go Standard (BGS): Robot shall bump the hanging tetra before leaving base
Tetra on Center Standard (TOC): Robot shall place loaded tetra onto back line center goal
(These standards are not necessarily logically correct and there are about 50 more “states” that I will let others propose & develop)
With the understanding that a team member came up with this idea and I’m just posting it, I think that this is a terrific idea. Here are some highlights
- It allows the students along with engineers an opportunity to experience the development of standards and how they can be useful. As engineers, we use standards all the time (SAE, Military Specs, ANSI, NPT, ASME, IEEE, etc.).
- It will hopefully make for good autonomous periods that look more like a ballet than the walkways during the end of a baseball game. With three teams in each alliance, good planning is going to be a must to avoid collisions that can destroy an alliance’s autonomous period.
- Teams could host certification sessions at the competitions by having teams attempt certain standards several times to see if they can accomplish the standard. Some guidelines could also be set up for self certification such as, “your robot must be able to accomplish a standard 5 of 6 times before claiming that the robot is certified
in that standard.” This could also be a good scouting tool. - It would help teams understand all their options because almost all of the autonomous scenarios would be captured in the standards.
Finally, I think it is appropriate to add a few words about collusion and standards. Standards can be a great help to society but they can also be used for exclusion and domination. Standards themselves do not typically lead to collusion in the real world; it is typically who is invited to write the standards and who has access to the standards that leads to collussion. For example, if General Motors, Texaco, Chevron, Auto Zone, and Goodyear got together to create automotive standards that they only have access resulting in all GM cars needing Texaco or Chevron gas, Auto Zone parts, and Goodyear tires, this would be bad for society (my opinion only … yes, you could argue that this would be good for society but I’ll leave that debate for another day.) On the other hand, if all the automakers, petroleum companies, parts distributors, tire manufacturers, along with other auto-related companies were invited to write automotive standards that everyone had access to, this would be great for society; this is fortunately how it is today (SAE, ANSI, ASME, etc.).
With WAM, we would have to be very careful. I think that it is okay for those that participate on CD to write the standards BUT the standards would have to be distributed to all of the teams in a timely manner. I believe that a FIRST E-mail Blast at the beginning of the fourth week would satisfy this timely manner requirement.
With all that said, I’ll solicit Dave’s (Lavery) advice to decide whether he thinks that WAM Standards would be too exclusionary or against the Spirit of FIRST. If Dave thinks that WAM is a bad idea, we will terminate this thread immediately.