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Adding short safety warnings to the Path-Based Tutorial

Open clockworkthought opened this issue 2 years ago • 1 comments

The WPILib RamseteCommand have a lot of very powerful tools now that teams are going back to a genuine autonomous period, but the current Path-Based tutorial is somewhere between 'written for a higher level of familiarity than most teams needing it will be at' and 'mildly suicidal'. In particular, there is a significantly higher than zero chance that a team copying the code directly will either find their robot's first RamseteCommand to result in their robot zipping backward at maximum power, zipping forwards at 20x their intended speed and distance, or spinning in circles at maximum power.

While I think there's some large benefit to be made, separately, be rewriting the tutorial to target a less experienced team, there are some more immediate benefits to simply not needing to fetch as much drywall spackle. In particular, some non-obvious problems that this highlights:

  • Warned that voltage, speed, and acceleration limits are only applied to trajectory calculation, and do not clamp the power settings to the drive subsystem.
  • Highlighted importance of the accuracy of wheel odometry, and encouraged new teams to run the wheel odometry on its own before running a RamseteCommand.
  • Encouraged teams developing new code to clamp the motor voltages before setVoltage() calls in tankDriveVolts(), at least during testing.

clockworkthought avatar Apr 08 '22 04:04 clockworkthought

Admonition should be 1-3 sentences. Otherwise they will become trivialized by the reader and ignored. Please break the paragraphs outside of an admonition or shorten significantly.

Daltz333 avatar Apr 08 '22 11:04 Daltz333