Code Cleanup

By Cooper and Mahesh

Task: prepare code-wise for robot in three days

To better prepare for “robot in three days” (ri3d for short), we decided to get ahead a bit and resuscitate the code base. After making sure everything was up to date, we set off on cleaning it up. Going through it, we simplified the movement pipeline, got rid of unused variables, and generally worked on formatting. After which came the big part of the day; getting rid of Ultimate Goal-specific code.

This was tough for one main reason. The aforementioned movement pipeline is the same lower-level pipeline we’d been using for years, with some new code on top of it to act as a higher-level interface for movement. The purpose of which was a rather basic field-relative movement method. However even basic, it was extremely useful last year in Auto, and would make sense to keep. All well and good, but since the entire method was built on the old pipeline, it was designed for 2 wheel differential steer robots. Go all the way back to rover ruckus, and you can see even back then we were using 2 big wheels instead of mechanums.

Therein lies the problem. The ri3d chassis that we had pre-built uses mechanums, and the 5-year-old mechanum code that was left in the codebase was certainly off. So, we decided to try and fix said code to see if the pipeline would be compatible. Surprisingly, after about an hour of head-scratching, not only were we able to get it to move in tele-op, but auton as well. This boils down to the fact that in essence, we’re still using the mechanums like normal wheels. But for ri3d, it was good enough.

Next Steps:

Integrate strafing into the pipeline such that the higher level move code can use it intelligently.