What is Graveyard Template?
Graveyard Template is a Vexide (Rust) foundation for odometry and localization that runs on both the V5 Brain AND your PC, so you can develop and debug without a physical robot. This allows you to build and test custom additions with ease and not have to worry about needing a physical robot to code.
Graveyard Template also features a simple path visualizer built in. By simply logging the robot’s pose every cycle, the program will draw the path the robot followed in an SVG file. This allows extremely quick debugging of your odometry configuration and future modifications you make.
One of the most important features of Graveyard Template is the Odometry trait system. Because of the way the robot is coded, you can swap entire odometry subsystems in seconds. One moment you could be using real dead-wheels and an IMU, the next you can use synthetic data for consistent debugging.
Goal
The goal of this template is NOT to provide teams with an extremely quick and easy way to make autons, it is to provide teams with a stepping stone to using Vexide and to encourage them to build on this template. This is why we designed Graveyard Template to be so scalable. We don’t want teams to be locked into the complex architecture of a template. We want them to be free to add, edit, and remove components as they need, with minimal impacts on other parts of the code.
Because of this goal, I am unsure how many updates will be added in the future. We may later release optional EKF / MCL modules as separate examples. The core template will stay minimal, so teams still have to understand and own their estimator.
This template is intentionally incomplete for full competition use. Path following, full sensor fusion, and movement controllers are left out on purpose, so teams learn those systems instead of inheriting a black box.
How to use Graveyard Template
Head over to the GitHub page and follow the instructions to install in the README.md file. Vexide must be installed first - follow the official setup guide before using this template.
Want to Leave Feedback?
Feedback on this Library would be greatly appreciated, whether its questions, concerns, or bugs. To leave feedback, you can respond on this Google Form or reply directly on this thread. If you want help or guidance on where to go from here, I am more than happy to help and might consider future updates if enough people request it. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope this library helps.