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The Robot is Packed

Dan says it better than I would have, so I will steal his work and post it here :-)

Mr. Postman, how many stamps do you put on a robot?

Spent most of the day over at Bellevue HS working on the robot. Bellevue’s robotics club, has been sharing some of their space with us and we have been sharing some of our equipment (particularly the parts of the playfield that we have constructed). It has been a mutually beneficial arrangement. We spent the bulk of the day working on autonomous modes. If we had another week, I am confident we could get our desired autonomous mode working. Namely, visually acquiring the location of field elements and using that information to run one of 16 driving programs in order to place a tetra on the center goal. All the pieces of code are there, we just don’t have enough time to plot out and test all the routes. Instead, we have fallen back on our “Plan B.” Plan B is to use dead reckoning to grab a tetra off one of the autonomous loading stations and place it on the near, inside goal and then return to near the loading station for the beginning of user-controlled mode. By the end of the day, we were doing this with pretty fair regularity. We will have to tweak our code a bit to accomodate for slight differences betweeen our practice field and the field at the Pacific Northwest Regional (like carpet type, slight differences in measured distances, etc.), but I am pretty confident we will be able to do this about 75% of the time. Based on what I have heard on the boards and what I saw from other teams at our the practice meet that we held yesterday, probably less than 10% of all teams will have a viable autonomous mode. I really wish that FIRST would give teams a little more time. 6 weeks is just too little time to be reinventing the wheel every year. Anyways, bitter recrimintion aside, it has been a WILD ride these last six weeks and I am pleased to say that Tyr is now safely ensconsed in a very large shipping crate awaiting pickup. Portland here we come!

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