Victoria Qualifier (Jan 28.)

We are extremely happy with how things we not at the Victoria Qualifier event. We had some really high-scoring matches and proved the capabilities of our robot and autonomous program. We were on the second alliance with Mount Doug and ended up winning the final matches! We qualified for the provincial championships because we were the captain of this winning alliance.

Firstly, I want to talk about two key programming features that have contributed massively to this robot's success. These do not just help in autonomous or driver-controlled but constantly, for every part of the game. The first feature is our self-correction mode. It is easy for a robot to get caught on a junction and rotate around it or change its orientation/location in some way. This can be a huge problem in autonomous mode because nobody can correct the robot if it is knocked off course. Simply touching a junction or even a ground junction at the start of an autonomous program can ruin the rest of it. To solve this we are using the robot's IMU to correct its orientation at all times. It detects if it is in the wrong orientation and set's the motor values to counteract this and bring it back to the correct orientation. The drivers can also use this to help make their job easier. The second feature is a complete redesign of the driver controls. This one is hard to explain so bear with me. The standard way of controlling a robot goes as follows: the left joystick controls movement (up makes the bot go forward, down=back, etc.) and the right joystick controls rotation (left makes it spin left). This works great until you are in a real game. It can get complicated and stressful and there is a more efficient way for the drivers to drive the robot. By pressing the left bumper while the robot is facing away from them the drivers can activate a special feature. Now, using the IMU, no matter which way the robot is facing, the driver's left is left and the driver's right is right. This means when the driver presses forwards, the robot will not move forwards according to its rotation, it will just move away from where the driver is standing. This makes driving 10x easier. Somebody with no FTC robot driving experience can easily weave the robot through the junctions using this mode. We also added a mini-feature to this where the robot can rotate dynamically. Normally you have to move in one direction, rotate the robot, and then you can move again. Using dynamic rotation, you can rotate while moving in one steady direction smoothly. The IMU will act as an onboard computer and take the driver inputs (left + rotate left for an example) and do the calculations to tell the motors the values of power they need to run at to achieve the inputs requested (the robot will magically rotate left and drive left super smoothly). This saves a couple of seconds every time we change direction/rotate the robot.

Our autonomous program is an expansion of what we had for league 1. Back then our robot used vision detection to scan the custom signal sleeve to know which two tiles it needed to park on. We also gave it a preloaded cone which it would place on the medium junction close by while on the way to the parking area. For this event, we made it significantly better. Once it places the preloaded cone on the junction, the robot will maneuver itself to the stack of cones against the sidewall and pick up another. It will drive back to the junction, place the cone, head back to the stack, grab another, place it and so on. We place 3-4 cones, in total, onto the medium junction during autonomous. This system is extraordinarily reliable, the one time it failed to complete the program was when another robot from the opposing alliance bumped it off course.

We have done a lot of driver practice this year so it is no surprise that our drivers did excellently. The drivers replicated their practice perfectly onto the full-size field and consistently scored 50ish points by themselves. We made quick decisions that benefited us and lead to us scoring the most points possible. Since league 1 we added a plastic sheet above the grabber to make it easier to pick up cones off of the stack. We just drop the slide down until the sheet hits the top of the cone and then we are at the perfect height to pick this cone up. This, along with dynamic rotation, means that we can pick up cones from the stack up against the wall just as quickly as single ones placed by the human player in the optimal position. This gives us versatility and makes our robot compatible with every other robot out there. We mostly focus on placing as many cones as possible onto the closest high junction (C2 or 3-2). This works well for us because of our fast cycle time.

Our end game strategy is every so slightly different now, compared to the last event. We read that the human player can place a cone down, then place the beacon over top of the cone. We redesigned our beacon to fit over the cone like a sleeve. This system worked well. We weren't able to place our beacon on the junction every time, but when we did we got 10 points for the beacon as well as the points for the cone. After placing the beacon/cone combination, we continued on with placing cones on junctions and even parked once or twice. Time is never really a big issue in the end game. We have a quick robot base with a fast linear slide so we are rarely worried about running out of time placing our beacon, (we prioritize this/do it first because of the print benefit). We still may need to do a little bit of end game practice before provincials.

Not only did we qualify for the Regional event, but we won two awards. The first was the Innovate Award which is about coming up with creative and innovative solutions/parts for the robot. We were also given an award, along with Mount Doug, for being the winning alliance at the event. We are super proud of these awards and they mean a lot to us.

This event went extremely well, we have never done a qualifying event before but this felt much like the main event which is coming up in Vancouver. We are excited about that and can't wait to see how we do there.

We will try to post a video or paragraph here about our robot before the event, so stay tuned for that.

League 1 Scrimmage

Full matches 

Each year when the first FTC event rolls around all of the local teams will come together to play in a scrimmage. This is the first big opportunity to see what robots/strategies/autonomous programs other teams have created. League 1 can shape the rest of the season as you take inspiration from other teams.

We were confident going into the event as our robot was complete, our autonomous programs worked, and we practiced driving and talked about different strategies. This year we were more prepared than we were previously. Very quickly we ran into a problem with our autonomous program. During test matches, it just wasn't able to detect the images on the signal sleeve, something we have been able to do reliably in the garage. The yellow on our screwdriver (we use vision detection, not just a colour sensor) was too faint to be seen by the camera. We were able to colour over it with yellow and test it on top of our table, it worked well. In the future, we are going to make it green so it can be seen easier. The other problem with the autonomous was due to the junction we place a cone on being wonky. Because it was straight up and down our robot would attempt to place it where the junction should have been but it was tilted and the cone would not go on. Sometimes this would even make the robot get caught at the junction and stop us from parking. This problem was fixed by us trying to move the robot side to side on the wall by a couple of centimetres to account for the slant but this had minimal effect. The autonomous was still amazing usually being able to score 20 points for parking. Our drivers spent a ton of time practicing and as such were amazing during this event. No matter the strategy they used they navigated quickly through the junctions. This is due to the small robot base equipped with an Omni-X drivetrain giving us the benefits of mecanum wheels. Coded into the tele-op program were a couple of buttons that kept the robot from spinning if it bumps something as well as a button to recenter the controls to the robot's current orientation. The linear slide was super fast and efficient at delivering cones however its robustness was tested. After two matches the slide broke and it kept getting jammed, this could be temporarily resolved by putting it down and then up and down but it was extremely broken. Upon inspection we noticed that there were loose screws, we had less than 15 minutes to do the fix so we took the slides apart, tightened everything and put them back together. We thought this solved the problem but the slide once again started failing in the final match we were able to deal with it and still score cones.

The matches went extremely well, we were able to consistently get over 100 points. The hardest part of playing this year's game is playing with an alliance. Because of the crowded game field, it is a challenge to stay out of all of the other robot's way and still score points quickly. Along with this you would be constantly changing strategies from match to match depending on what your alliance could do. Despite the challenge, we were efficient and consistent throughout the matches. We put a big focus on making sure the beacon is placed onto the junction because of how many points it scores. We also placed it strategically on a junction owned by the opposing alliance especially if it would break their circuit. Our most efficient strategy was to take cones placed by the human player, put them on the nearest high junction (3,2) and repeat this process. Our robot was also capable of taking cones from the stacks on the sides and trying to make a circuit.

Below is a table of our match scores. We went undefeated throughout the entire event and had an average score of  114 points putting us in 1st place. We could not dream of a better start to the season and we are continuing to work hard to carry this momentum into the next event. League 1 was so much fun and we cant wait to see all of the teams again in League 2.