MA Control Award Winner | Wolfpack Machina 18438 

wait this was a long comment, sorry to whoever is responding, if someone responds

@@spidernh lol no worries thanks so much for the questions, gimme a minute ill go through all these

@@owen9573 I have a feeling it'll take more than a minute lmao

1. Yeah thats exactly right, essentially our vision finds both blue boxes on either side of the ultimate goal vision target and averages them to find the position of the center of the goal in frame. then it converts the x pixel coordinate of that into an angle, which is then fed into the pid system to actually physically turn the robot 2.Yea the two main purposes of the hood are 1: what you said for adjusting minor differences and then also 2: for aiming while moving, as it can move to compensate for the robots velocity (eg. shoot rings further to the left if the robots moving right). we just found the pid system didn't hold up well enough while moving to do this 3. powershots is a whole bunch of trig that I cant hope to explain in a youtube comment but I can send a picture if you want. Essentially yes it is using the same angle measurement from the high goal autoaim and then working off of that, its a bit more robust than just an offset though because it takes into account how far the robot is away and stuff like that and actually aims to a point on the wall where it calculates a power shot is, instead of going a set amount of degrees away from the high goal 4. I think the main thing that really helped us with this was both accelerations and decellerations. they help a ton to reduce wheel slippage and any sort of weird jump that wed otherwise get from starting or stopping at full power. we definitely saw some gyro drift too but it was never really enough to mess anything up during just the 30 seconds. strafing was also noticeably less consistent for us so we tried to avoid it for the most part unless it was something that didn't need much accuracy 5. kinetic energy turns are something that we only use during teleop, and they modify the target angle of the pid while the driver is manually turning the robot. For example, if the driver is spinning the robot at full speed and then stop providing input to the controller at 95º, then the code calculates the kinetic energy of the robot at that moment by measuring the rate of change of the gyro, squaring it, and then multiplying that by the robots moment of inertia (which is a constant that we found through testing). Then it adds that offset to 95º (say it gives back 110º) and makes 110º the new target angle for the pid. basically its calculating what angle the robot would naturally coast to if not constrained by the pid which makes it feel very natural to drive, but still locks to an angle with the pid 6. We had encoders and a pid on our intake because our fabric roller worked best at a really specific speed, and the speed was fluctuating too much when a ring went up the intake (this is a problem that we eventually just fixed by slapping another motor on it) you were right that might have been a bit more than a minute. hopefully all this came out with at least some sense but definitely let me know if you have any other questions

@@owen9573 1. Ok cool, I'm guessing the blue boxes are just the spot behind the target 2. k 3. yeah probably complicated, hopefully next year we don't need to do anything like that so I don't need to understand that, but a picture would be interesting. also when do you learn trig? I'm still in middle school (ftc is middle school in michigan) so I don't really know anything about that. my school also has accelerated math so in 7th grade you can do algebra, and I'm a year ahead of that lmao 4. for that do you use the motor.runToPosition, or something else? Is it just a loop, and when the robot is close to the starting point or ending point of the line it's driving it's slower, but when it's closer to the middle it's faster? 5. why are you using PID for driver controlled? is it basically like the driver lets go of the stick, then it turns to the position that the robot was at when the driver let go? to me at least this just seems confusing and not worth the time, especially since we aren't the most competitive team (I'd like to be, but the rest of my team seems to care about awards more, which are still important but are less fun to get than having a good rank imo) 6. oh ok youtube says 24 minutes so yeah I'd say it was a little more than a minute also are you going to use odometry next year or stick to what you did this year? it seemed like not having odometry worked fine, but it would probably be better to use odometry also what happened to Lupine Robotics? it seems like there was a competition where the matches were uploaded onto this channel, then they had more competitions that weren't posted. Your robots seemed pretty similar at the start of the season, did your teams merge or why weren't their good matches also uploaded to this channel? also I see we both have terrible sleep schedules, midnight for me rn and you're in the same timezone as me according to where your team is from

we dont use odometry, the input for all of those algorithms all comes from our vision system. Using the vertical position of the goal in the frame in pixels, the measured height of the goal in cm, and a ton of trig we can find the robots horizontal distance away from the base of the goal, which is the input into the equations. thanks so much for the question

ok ayush