Initializing... Automotive Movement Engaged

The autonomous mode is super important because it’s a first impression for your robot and has a large potential of earning points. Most robots are very busy during TeleOp; it’s hard to keep track of them all, even when you have 4 team members watching each match! But if you can be busy during autonomous, people will notice your consistent early leads.

So for this competition we planned to attain a 20 point autonomous by moving the big rectangular object (the “Foundation”) for 15 points and parking on the tape in the center of the field (or “Navigating”) for 5 points. This was a grand step up from our previous autonomous mode, which only parked. But naturally with higher points comes higher difficulty. The robot was completed about a week before the competition, giving us one week to program the Foundation mode.

The first plan was to perform lots of measurements and calculate everything so we didn’t have to have any trial and error and everything would work perfectly. We began tuning our elevator and drive train to get our code measurements as close to the resulting robot movement as we could. But even with these calibrations, we had drift issues where some motors moved faster than others. With 2 days to prepare, we decided that trial and error, unfortunately was a better option than fixing the drift via code. So that’s what we went through, throughout the rest of our practice and during the competition. We didn’t like it, and I promised that we would never do that again, but at the very least it worked out.

The code moves the Foundation by gripping it with claws at the front that lock in to the Foundation when it is close, then pulling it back to the diagonal tape in the corner (the “Building Zone”) to score our 15 points. Then, we turn out a little bit to ensure the robot doesn’t grind against the wall, and drive towards the parking site. The turning and maneuvering at the end was because of a strategy we had where we would park against the side of the bridge to let the alliance park near the wall. But since our driving was so inconsistent, this failed as the robot would just hit the alliance anyway, and allow only one robot to park at a time. So we scrapped it for the competition, and instead just drove directly towards the tape instead.

This little challenge taught our team that trial and error should be avoided at all costs and if we see trial and error we need to ready the pitchforks, the drones, and the battle bots. Did we deserve the 20 points? Probably. But what did it cost? Everything (including but not limited to collisions for both the robot, our alliance’s robot, and my head against the wall. Many times).