Add README

[aidnem]

Adds README.md with instructions on how to use the sim, a description of impressive features of this year's codebase, and a general description the project's structure.

[aidnem]

@godmar I've written instructions on how to get started with the sim. The rest of the README isn't done yet, so this PR is a draft until I finish that, but I wanted you to have access to the guide as soon as possible. Please let me know about anything I can improve in the guide, I want it to be as helpful as possible.

You can view the work-in-progress README here (or in the changed files, although that UI is a lot harder to read in my opinion).

[godmar]

Great!

Can you list the environments concretely? What is comp (competition?) demo, test_ramp, test_drivebase and hitl?

I've gotten to the simulator setup, but my ghost/componentPositions are outside the field and the robot is inside the field, as you can see here:

Is there a way to "reset" the robot into a known position to start from?

[aidnem]

@godmar Sure thing! I added descriptions of the environments to the README and I'll copy them here too:

This project has the following environments:

• comp: This is environment contains gains for the competition robot.
• hitl: HITL stands for Hardware-In-The-Loop. Last season, we struggled with integration because we hadn't let our code interact with hardware enough prior to getting the final robot. This meant that we didn't see a lot of problems early enough, and had to work much faster to solve them all very quickly. To combat this, we used a test setup that we called "The HITL rig." It was a piece of plywood, with a RoboRIO, a PDH, a breaker, and a radio. Whenever a prototype of a subsystem was completed, we would wire it to the HITL board and try to integrate its code in isolation. This allowed us to fix bugs that only appeared in hardware, as well as iterating on our sensor placements and code design for the claw/indexer before the claw was made out of the final materials. It also meant that, when we did receive the completed robot, we could focus more on making the systems work together rather than having to tune every single system on the robot individually one after another.
• test_drivebase: This environment contained gains for the test drivebase. This was a wooden chassis with slightly different dimensions that we used to integrate the drivetrain. While the rest of the robot was being designed, programmed, and fabricated, we were able to use this test drivebase to run autos and tune our single-tag lineup system so that it only needed to have its gains updated to run on the competition robot.
• test_ramp: This environment was briefly used to initially test the ramp.
• demo: This environment contains a set of weakened gains for the competition robot to be used at demo events: the robot will move slower and be safer for people to be around.

Regarding the sim poses: It looks like componentPositions is being rendered as another robot instead of as components of the original robot, as seen here:

It also looks like you're using the KitBot 2025 model instead of our robot. Components won't render correctly until you switch to Robot 2025 by right-clicking where it says KitBot and then selecting Robot 2025 from the menu. If it doesn't show up, make sure your custom assets folder is set up correctly in AdvantageScope. If the guide for this is unclear or you have any questions/difficulties getting this to work, please let me know.

It's a little bit finicky, but when dragging the componentPositions out of the sidebar, hover them on top of the Robot entry and it should highlight in green:

Then you can let go of the mouse and it should add them as component positions:

I updated the README to this version to try and elaborate more to prevent that from being a point of confusion in the future.

[godmar]

Thank you, this is tremendously useful.

When you played in an alliance, did the teams coordinate who uses which reefs during the auto period? And if so, would that be an auto strategy or how did that get selected?

[aidnem]

You're welcome!
Before each match we would take a whiteboard with a top-down view of the field and draw out each of our autos to make sure we didn't collide. We would also generally plan who would score where in teleop.