Post UME Drive Changes

By Justin, Aaron, Trey, and ben

Task: Improve Robot Driving

Since the qualifier at UME, we have been focusing on tuning controls to make driving smoother. Our first set of improvements was changed turret controls. The turret driver now could turn slowly with the joystick and quickly with the triggers. This allows the turret driver to quickly move the arm when the base is driving and still be able to stack precisely. Next we noticed that manually moving the arm from a tower to a safe position was faster than our preset recall. We sped up this process to speed up our transport time. Drive practice has increased our capabilities with the robot a lot, and we hope it can make us competition ready.

The biggest improvement to driving was the addition of the Snapdragon gripper. The gripper allows us to align over a block and slap down to grab. This reduces the precision necessary to grab a stone, and reduces the time it takes to close the gripper. This gripper makes a lot of noise so as soon as the base driver hears the snap he or she should start heading towards the foundation. The increased speed of the turret allows the turret driver to move the arm out of the way while the base moves to the foundation. The use of progressive joystick movement makes precise placement of the base and arm much easier and gives our robot a smoother look in matches.

We have also made some adjustments to the extend presets for intaking stones. We have added a medium and long distance extension to allow the arm driver to quickly approach the stones, and quickly reach the safe zone from a distance during endgame. Practice with the arm has greatly sped up our cycle time and stacking ability.

Next Steps

We plan to continue training our primary drivers as well as secondary drive teams. We plan on playing practicing matches using the other teams' robots to practice moving around a busy field. We also need to make stacking at higher heights easier for the driver.