Okay guys the manual and I are not agreeing on the autonomous terms. If someone could please translate into accurate terms that an idiot can understand? If you could include how you get the bonus, who gets the bonus and when it ends, along with what you are and are not allowed to do?? PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, DO NOT QUOTE THE MANUAL, as that would only further confuse me and offer no help. Unless you wish to quote the manual in little parts with a translation below each one. That would be helpful.
Okay. First off, there is no autonomous bonus this year. What might be confusing you is that the bottom object in a goal, whether scored during autonomous or driver, gives its team what is called a “bonus point”. This has nothing to do with autonomous bonuses; there is no autonomous bonus this year.
When the animation says “the autonomous bonus comes from being the first object in a goal”, what I think it really means is that the people who wrote the rules thought an autonomous bonus wasn’t needed this year to reward the teams with the best autonomous routines. Since there is no descoring the feild position advantage that you gain by scoring several permanent bottom-of-goal-bonus points during autonomous will be very significant, so they were probably right. In Round up, An autonomous bonus was more important because all the rings scored during autonomous got descored later anyway.
What you are allowed to do during autonomous is a bit more complicated. This post probably best demonstrates what VEX expects to see, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a useful strategy or that it’s the best use of the new rules.
You definitely can:
- Point your robot in the right direction (repeatedly if you want to).(1)
- Make some use of human-activated sensors to run subroutines or to change autonomous modes after autonomous has started. (1)
You definitely can’t:
- Make extensive use of human-activated sensors to essentially duplicate the functionality of the controller on the robot itself and control autonomous manually (1)
- Have a strategy which involves assembling your robot manually during autonomous (2)
But there are grey areas, like how much you are allowed to use human manipulation of sensors. There are also bound to be things that haven’t been thought of yet that are borderline and might be ruled either way. I would recommend reading all the previous Q+A threads that relate to autonomous, and then you’ll know as much as anyone else does.