Autonomous usercontrol for ITZ

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
1

Hello! With all the precision driving of this game and all the relatively easy decision making

 
findNearestCone();
grabIt();
StackIt();
While(bTheUserWantsTheirRobotBack)
  DriveControl();

I would think that every team would want a mostly autonomous robot… right? As long as you keep a mobile goal in your back pocket you don’t even need inertial nav. Finding those cones might be the biggest challenge… also I’m currently planning on having the driver interrupt the autonomous mode once the stack gets too high to score it but that could also easily be autonomized.

2

I would think you could easily detect whether you have reached maximum height (max practical height or max for your robot) by sticking an ultrasonic/light sensor/maybe even line tracker that faces the stack and moves up/down with your lift. If your lift is at a certain height and a cone is detected, you have reached the max height.

3

But then inertial nav really isn’t worth it… the time difference between driver and autonomous will be pretty minuscule… although perhaps a function to tell the driver when to score the stack in a zone would be nice

4

I have nothing to add to the conversation other than OP’s username checks out.

5

What did my post have to do with internal nav?..

Anyway, how are you going to autonomously find stacks? LIDAR obviously isn’t legal for VRC…

Imagine having to deal with @OverlyOptimisticProgramer in real life on a regular basis… (Hint: look at our signatures; I will neither confirm nor deny that I have to put up with him in real life…)

6

How else would the robot get to the scoring area?

For VRC, You could just have a sonar in front of you and turn until you find something close… you might even be able to have the driver say to turn the other way or keep turning when they see a closer cone. The driver could also input if the cone is tipped.

You know you love me <3

7

You’d have to tell the difference between a wall, a stationary goal, a mobile goal, your alliance partner, the opposing robots, and a cone.

Also, ~round things don’t work well with ultrasonics.

8

Picking stuff up by the wall may need usercontrol and the driver can point the robot in the general direction of the cone and not an enemy or ally and you don’t need how far away the cone is; just that it’s there and it’s reasonably close. This idea works better with LIDAR capabilities.

9

I don’t think you’d even be able to tell that a cone was in front of you reliably. I haven’t done much work with ultrasonic, but I think the cone would probably reflect the ultrasonic wave away, so it never returned to the sensor.

10

I call them ultrashameic (pronounced ultra-shame-ik) sensors. You can tell I haven’t had good experiences with them.

They seem to never return usable values no matter what the surface.

11

We found them very frustrating. We did several tests to try and model the noise in them, and got nearly perfect results. Then we try and actually use them in practice and they are garbage.

We need to do tests regarding the ambient noise, as well as current going through wires in direct contact with the sensor wires to see if induced current is throwing everything off.

12

I’m thinking you gather cones manually, but as soon as the stack gets too high the bot autonomously brings it into a zone or drops it (do stacks count if the aren’t in zones?). Maybe a “stack on stationary goal” button as well?

13

Stacked Cones count as points anywhere on the field (as long as the robot of the color of the Mobile Goal at the bottom isn’t touching any of the otherwise Stacked Cones, that is). Mobile Goals, however, count for nothing except in the Scoring Zones.