Complete Beginner Huey Autonomous code

Programming Support VEXcode IQ Technical Support
1

Hi everyone,

I’m a primary school teacher working with VEX IQ for the first time, and I’m hoping for some guidance from those with more experience.

I have a brilliant team of children who have genuinely done everything asked of them. They have experimented with builds, adapted mechanisms, rebuilt sections of the robot multiple times, and refined their driver control to the point where the robot drives reliably and confidently under controller control.

Unfortunately, we have reached a complete roadblock with the autonomous coding for Mix & Match. This has been by far the most challenging and demoralising part of the process. The children will think they have made a breakthrough, load the program, press Run, and then nothing happens. After weeks of trying different approaches, both the children and I are starting to lose confidence, which is very difficult after seeing how hard they’ve worked on every other aspect.

We even removed our modifications and rebuilt the Huey Hero Bot exactly as per the build instructions, assuming this would make autonomous more accessible, but we’ve unfortunately found ourselves in the same position.

We have a competition coming up in a few weeks, and at the moment it looks like we may have to bow out of the autonomous section altogether, which is not where we hoped to be after so much effort.

At this stage, I would really appreciate:

  • advice on how simple autonomous is realistically expected to be at primary level
  • common pitfalls that might cause autonomous code to appear to “do nothing”
  • examples of very basic, reliable Mix & Match autonomous routines that could help us benchmark our approach

We are using VEXcode IQ (Blocks) with the Brain Inertial sensor .

Any guidance, examples, or direction you could offer would be hugely appreciated. Thank you sincerely for taking the time to support new teachers and teams. This community’s willingness to help is one of the reasons we’ve kept going.

Thank you in advance for any help!

2

Can you post screenshots of your code, especially where things seem to be running into inconsistency?

Also, a word of note, things are intentionally done in such a way to push kids along through the various stages of engineering, especially when it comes to autonomous. If you are using the built-in ‘Drivetrain’ code, there are variances within that that are going to make the code less repeatable. You start getting more refinement by instead breaking this out to direct motor control to get better consistency, as you’re now specifying behavior specific to your robot. From there, there are multiple ways to grow the control further, with even more consistency. No program will ever be perfect, as at the IQ level the sensors generally are not going to be perfectly refined enough to give you real world repeatability at max robot speed.

3

Hi there!
I am the programmer for my team, and I can agree with you that the autonomous code is the hardest part of VEX IQ.

If this is your first time(like me), expect their code to not run the same each time because of drift. The only way around drift is to learn PID, but this might take a long time to learn(especially since this is their first time). I suggest that they should just code something that scores either some points, or they can just code the robot to move forward and stop(one of our new teams did that) because having a autonomous code is better than not having one.

What do you mean by “do nothing”? Do you mean the robot is not moving or unable to score points. A screenshot of their code would be helpful.

PID is a great thing to learn when coding autonomous, but since your team is an elementary level team, I don’t think learning PID would be easy. Something else that you can use since they have a Huey robot is VEX VR(https://vr.vex.com/). This is really helpful when coding autonomous. https://kb.vex.com/hc/en-us/articles/40082172336148-Finding-Your-Team-s-Virtual-Skills-Key This will help you find your virtual skills key.

Hope you and your team have a great season!
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