Drive Practice 1/6

By Justin and Aaron

Task: Practice driving with new code

Today we worked on driving the robot with new presets. Over the weekend, our coders worked on new presets to speed up our cycling time. The first preset the drivers learned was the cardinal directions, which allows the base driver, but potentially both drivers to quickly rotate the turntable 90 degrees. This made switching from intakeing to stacking directions very fast. To further speed up our stacking time, our coders implemented a stack to tower height, which allows the driver to set a height and the gripper will raise to it. This took a lot of practice to correctly distance the robot from the foundation for the preset to reach the tower. To avoid knocking over our own tower, we decided that the arm driver should stop the 90 degree rotate before it fully turns, so when the arm is extended it goes to the side of the tower, so the driver can rotate the turntable and still place the stone.

We also worked on dividing the control between the two drivers, which involved transferring functions between controllers. We debated who should have turntable control and decided the base should, but we would like to test giving the turret driver control. The extend to height controls were originally on the drive controller but were moved to the turret to allow for a quicker extension process. The gripper wobble greatly slows down our stacking, even after dampening it.

Next Steps

Our next steps are to practice driving for our next qualifier and modify our gripper joint. A lot of our robot issues can be solved with enough drive practice. We need to start exploring other gripper joint options to allow it maintain orientation but not sway.