Driving at Regionals

By Justin, Aaron, and Jose

Task: Drive at Regionals

Driving at regionals was unfortunately a learning opportunity for our drivers. In our first few matches, for some reason we couldn't get our robot moving; we faced code crashes, cables being pulled, and incorrect calibration during the transition from autonomous to tele-op. These issues combined with our weak autonomous (sorry coders), led to a very unimpressive robot performance for our first few matches.

When we finally got our robot working, our lack of practice and coordination really showed. The lack of coordination between these drivers and coders resulted in drivers relying on manual controls, rather than preset articulations. Our articulations were also very harsh and untested, some resulting in constant gear grinding, which pushed the drivers to use manual controls. This slowed down our robot and made us very inneficient at cycling. The presets that gave us the most issues were transitioning from stacking or intaking to moving. The intake to north preset, which pointed the arm north after picking up a block, practically tossed the stones we picked up out of our gripper. The stacking to intake preset, which raised the arm off of a tower and pointed it south, would keep raisign the arm up, stripping the gears. This made us rely on our very slow manual arm and turntable controls. A failure in the capstone mechanism caused the capstone to fall off the robot during matches. With all of these issues, we stacked at most three stones during a match; not nearly enough to make us a considerable team for alliance selection.

Next Steps

We need to get consistent driver practice while coordinating with coders about the effectiveness of their presets. Many of our failures at regionals could be solved by driver practice. Our drivers being comfortable with the robot, both manually and with presets, would allow us to stack much faster and speed up the robot's in code to make our robot as efficient as possible.