11212: The Clueless

In high school I was a member of a community team, The Clueless. We're a group of passionate people who love robotics (This is where I learned to love robotics!!). It was my first experience with the grind and coding at a large scale. I learned to work with multiple people and this is where my majority of my Java knowledge came in. During the centerstage season we won the world championships.

FTC?

The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Tech Challenge is a robotics challenge for middle to high schoolers. It is a 2v2 robotics competition where robots do challenges to score points. Here is an informational video of the current FTC season: DECODE

If you're too lazy to watch the video, you can score points by shooting balls into a tall bucket essentially. The competition is ran on a control hub (basically an Android phone with a daughterboard to read hardware + you can run java on it)

Coding

While not an embedded environment, coding for robotics is extremely hard. You basically have to relearn a ton of programming concepts. As programmers, we're taught to seek optimization, clean code, etc. Here, the goal is to just get it to work in time. It's about creating reliable, tested code. It's about perfecting algorithms and tuning for absolute precision and consistency.

Algorithm: Pure pursuit

I could talk about algorithms all day but pure pursuit is a bit of a magnum opus from our team. Based on how humans drive cars, pure pursuit is a path following algorithm. It works by arcing the drivetrain directly to a path-circle intersection (where the circle's origin is at the robot).

A diagram of pure pursuit

I'll write more about this later when I have time because I'd really like to.