-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
History of Team 6201
In the 2016 FRC Build Season, no-one on our team was familiar with the software of FRC. Three members of our team (David Matthews, Max Nadaeu, and Adriana Massie) together were able to create software to drive our robot with a joystick and send a camera feed to the driving computer. Throughout the build season, our robot would occasionally fail to start up, complaining that something was crashing while initializing it. We were not quite sure of the cause and because it was infrequent we ignored it.
At our first competition, our robot had some issues. Our robot’s battery would mysteriously drop to very low voltages and the robot would reboot during the matches. After one of the veteran teams helped us investigate why this was occurring, we discovered that our motors were drawing a ton of current. We were able to hack together a solution by disabling half of our motors. This eliminated our brownouts, but made our robot have a harder time crossing obstacles.
Although we do not know exactly what was causing these brownouts, we believe them to be attributed to an increase in the friction between the wheels and the floor. At Somerville High School we were test driving out robot on waxed floors, and occasionally a concrete floor. These floors have much lower friction than the rugs of the competition field.
At our second competition, we discovered the value of cameras and the value of having a git repository. The crashes that we experienced when our robot was booting up from the build season came back. Our robot did not move. We suspected that some of the new software we had written since the last competition had caused the errors, but the cameras were also not appearing correctly in the roboRIO’s webpage. After spending many matches trying to determine what was causing our crashes, we were able to revert back to some software we had been using reliably in the past. After disabling the cameras as well, we had a moveable robot. Without our cameras, we really struggled to cross the obstacles, and we struggled to score balls in the tower.
Despite the many issues we had, our software worked very well for being a first year team. We created a control system that optimized both slow and fine movements, as well as high speed travel. This control system was very intuitive to drive and was a major asset to our robot. Although our cameras failed on us, we were able to get a video stream to the driving computer which enabled us to get a better sense of where we were on the field. We also were able to experiment with pneumatics control, and sensors.