Autonomous Robot Projectile Targeting

My autonomous projectile targeting system for my school’s First Robotics Competition 2023-2024 Crescendo robot was a mathematical feat combined with an impressively efficient implementation. The goal of the robot game involved launching discs into tall receptacles. I combined a projectile trajectory formula that I found online with data about the robot and field, including its rotating shooting mechanism and the distance/height of the receptacle, to create a (slightly over-engineered) mathematical function to calculate the exact angle at which the robot should shoot to get the disc into the receptacle. Computing the function took too long to do in real time, so I wrote an algorithm to use both of the robot’s processing cores to populate a lookup table for all likely distances and their corresponding angles when it starts up. That way, the robot could quickly find the angle at which to shoot using data from its camera without affecting performance. This all brought the team much success in the competition rounds.