Time Awareness

In autonomous, every second counts. Even the most reliable and fast routines can fall short if they don’t account for the clock. Without time awareness, your robot risks:

• Running out of time before finishing a scoring cycle.

• Wasting the final seconds driving nowhere instead of parking.

• Missing an opportunity to grab last-second points with a last-ditch attempt score.

This is where time-aware strategies come into play. By keeping track of the remaining time in a match, your robot can make better decisions dynamically—choosing when to keep cycling, when to switch to parking, and when to go for one last scoring attempt.

Real-World Scenarios

• The robot is mid-cycle with only 1 second left—so it pushes for maximum speed to score the game element.

• With 3 seconds remaining, the robot knows it doesn't have enough time to attempt one more cycle—so it chooses to park and secure guaranteed points.

• A subsystem can automatically change modes at the 30-second teleop mark (e.g., preparing a hang mechanism).

The possibilities are truly endless.

Using Marrow

To make this easier, Marrow provides MatchTime.

Instead of writing your own timers, MatchTime gives you a clean and readable API for checking elapsed/remaining time, checking thresholds, and triggering behaviors based on the match clock.

For a full breakdown of how to use it in your own code, see the MatchTime reference page.