Replay Autonomous

By Arjun

Task: Design a program to record and replay a driver run

One of the difficulties in writing an autonomous program is the long development cycle. We have to unplug the robot controller, plug it into a computer, make a few changes to the code, recompile and download the code, and then retest our program. All this must be done over and over again, until the autonomous is perfected. Each autonomous takes ~4 hours to write and tune. Over the entire season, we spend over 40 hours working on autonomous programs.

One possible solution for this is to record a driver running through the autonomous, and then replay it. I used this solution on my previous robotics team. Since we had no access to a field, we had to write our entire autonomous at a competition. After some brainstorming, we decided to write a program to record our driver as he ran through our autonomous routine and then execute it during a match. It worked very well, and got us a few extra points each match.

Using this program, writing an autonomous program is reduced to a matter of minutes. We just need to run through our autonomous routine a few times until we're happy with it, and then take the data from the console and paste it into our program. Then we recompile the program and run it.

There are two parts to our replay program. One part (a Tele-op Opmode) records the driver's motions and outputs it into the Android console. The next part (an Autonomous Opmode) reads in that data, and turns it into a working autonomous program.

Next Steps

Our current replay program requires one recompilation. While it is very quick, one possible next step is to save the autonomous data straight into the phone's internal memory, so that we do not have to recompile the program. This could further reduce the time required to create an autonomous.

One more next step could be a way to easily edit the autonomous. The output data is just a big list of numbers, and it is very difficult to edit it. If we need to tune the autonomous due to wear and tear on the robot, it is difficult to do so without rerecording. If we can figure out a mechanism for editing the generated autonomous, we can further reduce the time we spend creating autonomous programs.