So, let’s say that you have an autonomous that works half the time. It’s supposed to drop a cube on the skyrise base and then nest the skyrise section in the base, but half of the time, it places the section right inside the cube, but next to the base.
There’s a way to fix this, if you have unused pneumatics or motors.
Create an arm that folds out from your robot during auton. use pneumatics or a servo to hold it out. On the end of the arm are line followers. make it so that the arm is positioned in such a way that when your skyrise -placing mechanism is perfectly over the skyrise base, the arm and line follower sensors are right in front of the autoloader, which, at that instant, the autoloader person places a skyrise section in the autoloader and the line followers read that it is being placed and tell the robot that it can place the skyrise section NOW.
I’m not an official, so take what I say with a grain of salt: it seems to me that there was a question posted in the official Skyrise Question and Answer forum a month or so ago asking about people “interacting” with their robot via the presence or absence of a skyrise section being placed in the autoloader, and the response was that such an “interaction” would be legal since the robot is allowed to respond to its game environment. So I’m guessing this would be okay. I just haven’t been able to find that official response.
Interesting idea. If I am understanding your concept correctly,the line tracker is sensing you putting the section in the auto load holder. One potential issue might be inertia. It might be difficult, depending on the design, to get the arm placing the skyrise section to stop instantly. This may also be why placing the skyrise is a bit inconsistent.
Good luck, though. Let us know if you get it working. I like the innovative thinking.
This is a neat idea, but I think it goes against the spirit of the “no human interaction” clause for autonomous.
I could be wrong, but I would be cautious of using this strategy as it may not be legal. (unless what FullMetalMentor said is correct and there was a Q&A about this topic)
I kind of doubt that you could get this precise enough to work as you would have to place the skyrise section and have the robot detect it at the exact right moment. At least I don’t see it being any better than just programming it to work in a more traditional way. Eg encoders etc.
Thanks for finding that. After reading it again, I can see that Karthik’s response does leave some room for interpretation, and you could be at the mercy of the refs in a grey zone like this.
That reminds me that I forbade by kids from using re-positioning last year for the very reason that during the excitement of a match, they often aimed the robot off target. So I required the autonomous to be completely automated - no touching allowed.
