I am curious what sensors teams are using for autonomous and programming skills. So far, our teams have just used potentiometers on the mogo intake and shaft encoders for the drive. They use PID for the mogo intake but so far, not on the drive.
At least one of the teams is thinking about the use of light sensors and line trackers and possibly bumper switches. They are also looking to add PID to the drive code. Prior robots for this team have only included the mogo intake for skills but are planning on trying to add cones to the mix.
What are your thoughts? What kind of scores have you achieved? What score are you realistically hoping to achieve?
I personally am planning on using 1 Shaft encoder for my drive, 1 for my lift, and 1 for my 4-bar. I don’t really need a sensor for my mogo intake because it only goes to 2 different positions, so I can just give a power of 20 to keep it in that place. We are realistically going to go for a 104-108 in drivers and (If we have the time) a 102 in programming. The highest Driver Skills score so far is 116 (By XD Robotics) and the highest programming so far is 84 (Also by XD Robotics. Dang kiwis). Programming Skills might be a stretch, but I think we can get our goal in Drivers Skills.
Oh, OK. That makes sense. Of course it is also not a fair comparison since they can have things on their bots that are not available for VRC plus their robots can be bigger and expand more.
3 shaft encoders: 2 on the drive (so if one fails, there is a second) and one on our rollers for cones
2 lines sensors: 1 on our mobile goal intake and 1 on our rollers
4 gyros: 1 on our base, 1 on our mobile goal intake, 1 on our main DR4B, and 1 on our roller 4 bar
As everyone is, I’m shooting for 100+ programming and driver which I think should be reasonably doable with PID and the amount of sensors. Right now with our old bot (which wasn’t a internal stacker) we achieved a 20 programming skills (which was our auton) and a 72 in driver. I really like the use of line sensors for detecting cones and mobile goals and I have found gyros to be more reliable than poteniometers and do not have the slots to do more than 3 or 4 shaft encoders because of my auton picker jumper setup.
We currently have
Drive: 2 encoders
Lift: 2 pots
Mogo: 1 pot
4-bar on lift: 1 pot
We may add limit switches and stuff once we actually start working on programming skills. Realistically, we’ll probably get to 50 or 60 in programming, and 80 in driver.
@fraxker if you need more ports available, one idea would be to use a potentiometer for auton selection. Since it uses an analog port, that would free up the digital ports you are currently using.
We have 3 line followers and two encoders on the drive base, a pot for the lift, we plan on adding a pot on our four bar and mogo intake once we get more parts, and we have an encoder on our rolling cone intake. We also have a pot to help with LCD code selection. We are also going to experiment with ultrasonic sensors to tell distance from objects.
True @blatwell, but I like my jumper setup because of how well it scales (every extra port is another power of 2) and I have found that gyros are the most consistant and accurate thing on the market also
I’d look into the LCD screen if i were you, you will be able to have an essentially limitless amount of autonomi and they are fairly simple to program.
You would be surprised at the power of gyros. In my opinion they are the best sensor currently. I have found they are more consistent than a potentiometer and are simple to attach and have a large range of application (base vs arms).
so you know when you have like 10 different auto codes? Jumpers inherently return 1, or 0 I forgot… search it up, but still it lives in the digital ports and you basically plug it. Then, in autonomous, you check to see which port has the jumper by referring to the SensorValue] function. Jumpers are used to “modify” code.
Sorry for not responding sooner. Out of all the auton control systems, I have found to prefer this one over others such as an lcd and potentiometers. The major benefit of this is the number of combinations is equal to (2^number of ports of jumpers - 1) so on my robot we have 4 ports for autons so I can do 15 different autons. I implement it a little bit differently just to make it a little bit more clean by assigning them number. If you want to see, you can look at it here https://github.com/1264D/1264DITZ/blob/master/Safety%20Patrol/SPauton.c and it is the function autonSelecter().
