Autonomous Test 1

After some arduous testing of the arm, and some quick tests out on the practice field in Missouri, we finally had a chance to really test the autonomous capablity of the robot with the encoder enabled. Yes only one encoder is working and this means I cannot drive straight unless I either get the other encoder fixed, or install a gyro. The good news though is that the PID controls work like a champ in keeping the voltage applied in tune to the encoder readings. The only outstanding bug is that whatever distance I tell it, it goes about double. I am looking forward as to why this is, but I can say that at least it is consistent when using the same distance.

Click Here to see some brief video footage of the tests.

One other thing that should be mentioned is that for whatever reason, one side may accelerate slower than the other when using lower voltage entries. This is something I cannot explain, but for reliable autonomous support, we really need to have something to correct for it.

It turns out that there are "Dead Zones" in the voltage submissions, and these dead zones vary from one direction to the next. I am hoping to get these calibrated to where both sides accelerate at the same rate. At present even the minor tweaks had better improvement on driving slow speeds. This dead-zone fix also impacts the encoder (and arm) to not cut-out when it gets closer to its destination. One other finding I have made is that I do not need the Kalman filter. The actual error was due to the teleop loop running while it was disabled. This caused poor reset when it became re-enabled. The Kalman filter causes some initial problems like delay on first starting.