Control Mapping

By Bhanaviya and Cooper

Task: Map and test controls

With the Hedrick Middle School scrimmage being a day away, the robot needs to be in drive testing phase. So, we started out by mapping out controls as depicted above.

Upon testing the controls, we realized that when the robot attempted to move, it was unable to do so without strafing. To fix this issue, we decided to utilize a "dead-zone" of the left joystick. The dead-zone is a range of values in our code that is basically ineffective. Although this meant that that the zone did not have a purpose, we realized that its uselessness could be rendered to stop the robot from strafing. Although we do plan to implement strafe later on in our actual competition robot (TomBot), for the duration of the scrimmage, the deadzone in Frankendroid's (our scrimmage robot) controls will hold the set of values for strafe so that the robot cannot strafe at any point in time during the scrimmage. This will give our drivers more control over the robot during matches.

Next Steps

We plan to drive-test at the scrimmage tomorrow to ensure that the robot can move accurately without strafing. Once we begin code on Iron Roomba, we plan to orient strafe in such a way that it does not interfere with the rest of the robot's controls. At any rate, the dead-zone has given us a possible solution to work with if the strafe issue occurs on our competition bot.Since this is the control map for our scrimmage robot, we anticipate that the controls will change once Iron Roomba is further along in the engineering process. A new post featuring Roomba's controls will be created then.