For the 2020-2021 season, mostly remote, the challenge is Ultimate Goal.  Robots have to essentially gather foam rings and shoot them into targets at the end of the field.  There is also a recognition task in autonomous where they have to recognize a stack of 0, 1, or 4 rings, and be able to navigate to specific locations on the field based on the stack height. They will have to grab a wobble goal and be able to deposit that into the correct square.

​

Season highlights: Control award trophy, 6th place trophy in qualifier, qualified and competed in NorCal regionals

​

Key learnings: Needed a better designed and integrated intake and shooting ramp for high throughput shooting, without transfers between disparate mechanisms.

​

April-May: With the Skystone season over, we continued the momentum in order to build obstacle avoidance algorithms into the robot. I designed an algorithm that would allow me to specify static obstacles using coordinates that would form arbitrary polygons, and exert a repelling force on the robot as it comes near it.  The force is inversely proportional to the distance from it and acts as a normal vector to whichever side of the polygon the robot is near.  Thanks to an open source project from another team that created a Dashboard, we could easily debug this algorithm by being able to visualize the forces and the track the robot followed.  Here are some videos showing the effectiveness of the algorithm in allowing the robot to avoid obstacles as it tries to follow the path set for it in its waypoints.