Drivers accidentally enabling Auto/Practice mode

[RyanShoff]

What would everyone think about changing the driver station to make it harder to enable Autonomous or Practice mode?

Our team had a least two incidents last year where the driver, while tethered, intended to enable Teleop mode and accidentally enabled Autonomous.

It would be easy to make the radio button default to Teleop after every disable. Or even better make Autonomous mode a completely different tab and button.

Last year we mitigated the risk by keeping the robot in the pits on a stand that kept the wheels off the ground and kept the shooter locked out so it wouldn't fire.

One of the incidents happened on the practice field. A typical cycle on the practice field was run Auto, have someone retrieve ball, run Teleop to drive back to starting line, load ball, maybe change a setting, and repeat.

If the driver forgot to switch from Auto to Teleop and enabled, the result is a second autonomous run starting when no one on the field is expecting it. This scenario could be avoided with a simple change to the driver station.

[Greg McKaskle]

Do you recall whether this was done with the mouse or the F1 shortcut?

One of the reasons I ask is that the button label could be made more explicit. Instead of saying Enable, and relying on the user to look at the mode section to verify what mode will be enabled, the button could replicate the info and be labeled as "Enable Auto" vs "Enable Tele". This would avoid the mode change side-effect and would help reenforce what the user is about to enable.

This doesn't help much if the F1 key is being used. But that could be removed. I don't think many people use it.

BTW, thanks for bringing this up, here or on the FIRST forum.

Greg McKaskle

[Andrew Schreiber]

Do you recall whether this was done with the mouse or the F1 shortcut?

One of the reasons I ask is that the button label could be made more explicit. Instead of saying Enable, and relying on the user to look at the mode section to verify what mode will be enabled, the button could replicate the info and be labeled as "Enable Auto" vs "Enable Tele". This would avoid the mode change side-effect and would help reenforce what the user is about to enable.

This doesn't help much if the F1 key is being used. But that could be removed. I don't think many people use it.

BTW, thanks for bringing this up, here or on the FIRST forum.

Greg McKaskle


I use F1 all the time... But that's because I prefer keyboard shortcuts.

[Aaron.Graeve]

Same here. I prefer the keyboard shortcuts, but I do see where they may cause a problem with knowing the robot mode. Even if the soft button changed to include text about the mode, it will still be a human error if the wrong mode is used.

[Bryce Paputa]

The F1 key is great

[RyanShoff]

It was with the laptop touchpad. I don't believe any of our drive team used F1 to enable.

[zinthorne]

I think the driver station should be changed. Being a driver myself and doing the scenario on the practice field that was mentioned above there were a few times where I forgot to switch it back and havoc ensued. It happened more often when I would leave the computer for a second, and then someone else would mess with it.

[Aren Siekmeier]

The F1 key is a must for us since we often have other stuff for diagnostics, data processing/logging etc. that can hide the DS interface. A quick press let's us enable to test, rather than finding the window and clicking in the right spot. And we can keep a full view of whatever other window is up when we enable.

Maybe have separate enable buttons (and keyboard shortcuts) for each of the modes? And keep the combined disable/e-stop commands.

[DavisC]

Could have something like after pressing Enable, have a menu popup to select which mode to run.

Could then also have that popup gain control so arrow keys can be used.

Also have F1 maintain the Enable mode, but then the user can use arrow keys or 1-3 respectively (or letters).

[adciv]

How about, whenever the robot is disabled, the setting is automatically reset to Teleop?

[Alan Anderson]

I'm looking at the suggestions to switch back to Teleop on disable, and I'm thinking about how inconvenient that would make it to test the robot. But instead of just shouting "NO! DON'T DO THAT!" I'm going to try something a little more constructive.

How about making the behavior a configurable option? Those who want it to be difficult to run Autonomous by mistake can set it up that way. Those who prefer it the way it is now don't have to be forced away from it.

[Aren Siekmeier]

I'm looking at the suggestions to switch back to Teleop on disable, and I'm thinking about how inconvenient that would make it to test the robot. But instead of just shouting "NO! DON'T DO THAT!" I'm going to try something a little more constructive.

How about making the behavior a configurable option? Those who want it to be difficult to run Autonomous by mistake can set it up that way. Those who prefer it the way it is now don't have to be forced away from it.

I agree that defaulting back to teleop after every disable is kind of a terrible idea. This would really derail any attempt at iterative testing in autonomous mode, and causes more unexpected behavior than the current configuration.

Keep the disable and e-stop buttons and hot keys. But for each mode, have a separate on-screen button and hot-key to enable this mode, so that by hitting this button or hot-key you are explicitly telling it to enable in a particular. The menu seems really impractical as well since it requires several steps and gets in the way of quick cycling.