Adjusting My Goal

To start off I would like to say that the 2014 FIRST championship was an incredible experience.  I was unable to attend any seminars but was able to talk to lots of teams about the way that they programmed their robot.  The other thought that I had was to adjust my goal.  My goal would still be to learn how to program the robot but instead of focusing on the human controlled portion of the match and on the autonomous portion of the match.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this years game challenge there are two portions of the game.  You can see this years game animation here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxp4dkMQ1Vo.  Each match starts with a 10 second autonomous mode in which the robots are running on pre-programmed instructions.  The next 2 minutes consists of humans driving the robots.  My new focus would be on the 10 second autonomous mode. At worlds other teams had lots of really cool autonomous modes.  There were several teams that used kinect systems to control there robot in autonomous.  However most teams just lode the code and let it run, which is what we do.  Our current autonomous mode is just a one ball autonomous.  Or we can only shoot one ball through pre-programmed instructions at the beginning of the match.  Several of the teams that did well had a two ball autonomous, some of them even had a three ball autonomous.  My new proposed goal is to program a working two ball autonomous that we can use at FRC kick off events next fall. I would greatly appreciate any feed back that you may have on this new goal.