Repositioning in College

[jgraber]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

there's just no challenge in making (wall robot).

Originally Posted by Rick TYler

I think this (no challenge in making wall robots) is demonstrably untrue. The two Gateway wallbots I've seen the most of (2W and 575) are as complicated as any other robot on the field. Building 575's no-motor six-foot expanding wall and single-wheel stacker was a significant design and construction challenge
...
(Maybe RD means) "We don't build them because we don't think building and driving wallbots looks like fun."

The above wallbots discussion reminds me of a similar discussion on using
flying saucer style rockets for high powered model rocketry, where someone claimed that they learned lots by working to scale up their saucer model from
D/E/F/G/H/I to J motors. More than the usual J motor 3 fins and a nose cone.

Originally Posted by bobsalive

College is meant to be technically more difficult - the GDC allowed custom electronics, but we are heavily disincentivised to use it because seven cameras and thousands of lines of code will still be beaten by a human repositioner. One minute autonomous is broken by repositioning, and the college division cannot gain the respect it needs in the academic community while repositioning is still there.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

How many Round Up autonomous modes lasted the entire 60 seconds?
The simple fact is that once something goes wrong in autonomous mode, without repositioning there is nothing that can be done to salvage the rest of the match, and most of the fanciest sensor programs could be beaten by just getting in the way.

You can find technical challenge where ever you want.
I keep thinking of combining College Engineering Senior projects with robotics contests, Vex or otherwise, since a contest provides a deadline, rules, constraints, community (in forums), and a way to compare your progress to others.
Among all the goals of a senior project:
- learning new stuff, learning to work hard, schedule management,
- advisor management, expectation management, purchasing and inventory,
- code revision control, funding, presentation skills, writing skills
- winning the game contest, winning other side prizes...
- getting a dream job offer because your capabilities demonstrated by senior portfolio...
- Keeping up GPA while passing senior design with minimum effort

you have to decide which is more valuable, and where to focus your energies.

[Jabibi]

I personally think that this rule should be done away with completely. During a "true" autonomous period there should be no human interaction at all. It honestly takes so much away from the challenge of strategizing and programming a solid autonomous.

However if your robot is having issues and it has not left the starting tile then you should by all means be able to touch your robot and fix it.

On another note I think it would be great if the college league had a programming skills challenge as well esp if it was a 2 minute autonomous.

[wrathofmobius]

Here's another idea I had: you can do anything to your robot, including repositioning or raising an arm (maybe), until you a)lose all contact with the Alliance Starting Tile, b)score an object, or c)load match loads. After that, it's a disqualification if you touch your robot. This would allow teams to reposition their robot if it's the wrong lineup, or repair the robot if it's broken, but nothing else.

[murdomeek]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

What's the fun in blocking someone from scoring when you could be scoring yourselves?

Because in gateway, most the time you block off two robots while your partner does all the scoring (essentially making it 1v0)

Yes, its not as fun as scoring, but its a solid "win" strategy

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by murdomeek

Because in gateway, most the time you block off two robots while your partner does all the scoring (essentially making it 1v0)

Yes, its not as fun as scoring, but its a solid "win" strategy

The problem with this is at smaller events, you are probably going to place your destiny in the hands of another team. I'm never a fan of this, I'd always rather control our own destiny (as much as we can, this is a robotics competition after all, so something will go wrong) and win out if possible. You win by scoring points.

Would we draft an awesome wallbot? Only if I thought with our one robot that we could outscore two robots. There are so many game pieces this year that I think that will be pretty difficult once you get to the later rounds of the eliminations.

[Totally Generic Name]

True. Of course, the aim of the game is to score more points than your opponent, so if you can get them to score 0 (or something low), that'll work too.

The repositioning rules don't seem very good, but it'll probably turn out that the best teams will have actual autonomous routines, at least for the most part. There's only so much you can do if you have to come back to the starting tile every time you want to move on to the next part of the routine or press a button. I was thinking having antennae attached to some sensor that detects when you're about to come into contact with another robot while a foot away so you have an abort code and don't get rammed.

[Vex Mundi]

Originally Posted by Totally Generic Name

The repositioning rules don't seem very good, but it'll probably turn out that the best teams will have actual autonomous routines, at least for the most part. There's only so much you can do if you have to come back to the starting tile every time you want to move on to the next part of the routine or press a button.

That sounds familiar .

People said the exact same thing about Gateway. It wasn't true for High School / Middle School, it wasn't true for the Programming Skills Challenge and (back on topic ) it wasn't true for College. People only started making "proper" autonomous routines when the World Champs Programming Skills Challenge forced them to.

Repositioning isn't always slower than a hands-off autonomous, even if it travels a greater distance. Hands-off autonomous routines have to go slower than maximum speed to be reliable. With repositioning, your robot can go really fast and you don't have to worry about going off course as long as you can get back to the tile. MNU is a good example of this - they had an effective isolation autonomous which did multiple short runs with their fast 2:1 drive. Relative to autonomous routines that did more per run at a slower speed, it was fast and reliable. You can see their isolation autonomous in these videos: red red blue

The other thing repositioning adds is that you can always start again if you mess up, meaning you can go for much longer before you make a mistake you can't recover from. In order to maximise this it helps to not go too far from your tile when you can help it. Because you aren't going far from your tile, coming back to your tile often isn't a major additional cost which makes repositioning a more attractive option.

So the claim that "good teams won't use repositioning" really isn't well supported by this year's experience.

[Ephemeral_Being]

While we aren't playing in the College Division (High School team), I have to agree that being allowed to reposition your robot does not constitute an autonomous period. I am the programmer for our VEX teams on campus, and while difficult to work with turning, it's a good learning experience to look at how turning in place versus trying to move to your objective while turning works. Sure, it takes longer to perfect, but a fully autonomous program is more rewarding to me than a hybrid.

Granted, a hybrid program was the winnig strategy last year, and we ended up using it. This year, though, I think that we're going to be going fully autonomous, as the goals are in the center of the field and repositioning to try and get more game objects just isn't time effective. Especially with the 15 second period we get this year, taking a 1 second pause to repositon is going to hurt a lot.

Out of curiosity, how many points was everyone planning to score during autonomous? I don't mean just high school, but college as well.

I appologize for any typos or if the wrong word was inserted somewhere. Autocorrect doesn't work quite as well as I'd like it to.