Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Hi All.

I wonder if you have faced a similar situation, when we played the Phoenix regional we found that the autonomous sequence was not run at the official field and after ending the 15 sec, we could control the shooter perfectly.

We tried to find any miscommunication or bug on the software , also we confirmed that robot performs the autonomous sequence perfect at the practice field but it did not work at the official field.

Due to the short time and to avoid generate more issues in the robot performance we played only with teleoperated and we did not use Autonomous, obviously this cause that our performance on the finals were not the best and we lost at the first round. :(

If you have any suggestion of what could happened will be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

There's not enough detail here to tell exactly what might have happened.

• What programming language are you guys using?
• Did this happen on every match?
• Did an FTA(A) or field guy come over and tell you if anything was up with FMS's communications?

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Did you talk to the FTA and/or CSA at the event? They are the people most likely to be able to help.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Whenever there's an issue programmatically that you are unsure of, it's always a good course of action to stand in the question box and request politely to speak with an FTA/FTAA.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

-We use Lab View

- This happend on all the match

- we Approach him and we reviewed all the setup , also we got support from other teams and we can not found the issue.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Just to double check:
Have you attempted to run the "practice mode" on the driver station while on the practice field?


More questions:

Do you reinitialize variables during the start of teleop?
Do you use any while loops?

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Instead of going through vague troubleshooting questions, it might be a good idea to post your code.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

This was our first year that we have a practice bot so we played around 100-120 games or more on practice mode in our town and we tested around 10 times or more at the practice field, No issues.

- Yes, we reinitiated variables during start of teleop.

- no, we did not use while loops, we used flat sequence

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

I will ask a copy and load it.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

When you test your code on the practice field did you just run the autonomous feature of the drive station or did you try practice mode? I would suggest running in practice mode as it simulates the various state changes out on the real fields.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

He already answered that.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Field logs may also prove to be valuable in the troubleshooting process.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

This happened to us only once on practice day at Waterloo, however I could not see clearly if we were having a jam or not.

I'd recommend looking through the Driver Station log files and check to see how the connection was looking like during the autonomous period in the matches. I've also found that the FTA is more than willing to pay special attention to your robot if you guys are having problems and check for any anomalies.

Not sure how your DriverStation is set up, but ours has SmartDashboard and it displays a Scheduler, which allows us to see if a command is running or not. You guys could try that if possible to check if the robot is actually running your specific autonomous commands.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Here is the code of the autonomous VI
Thanks guys!

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Our robot (team 701) had the same problems at the Sacramento regional.
We discovered that because we had the camera set up in autonomous,which was not needed anyway, and it was using too much band width on the field system.When we disabled it, autonomous worked perfectly.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

That autonomous code only tells about a third of the story. There's obviously more going on in another vi, most likely Periodic Tasks. The VI with the global variables would also be good to see, as would Begin.

If you zip up the entire robot project for us to look at, we can get a complete picture of what might be giving you trouble with autonomous mode.

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Exactly the same thing happened to us in the Israel Regional, and after a lot of research we actually figured out why it happened to us:

We retrieved the speed for our shooter to spin from the driver station with NetworkTables, and it seems as if on the field it only starts to transmit NetworkTables data when they start the game(in a regular situation it starts sending the values as soon as the driver station connects to the robot) - this caused the robot to think he didn't have to spin the wheels, and because the encoders showed him he was within the tolerance - the acsenter in our robot started to push the Frisbee towards the wheels - but the wheel didn't spin, so the Frisbee got stuck, eventually the robot did receive the value, (but it seems as if the wheels in our shooter doesn't have much torque, and it wasn't enough to shoot the frisbee), but the front wheel did spin, as it got the speed it should spin in.
And so we lost that game - as our robot could not shoot, and we just had to give up autonomous.

I discovered that this is the reason because one of the teams from our regional played in the DC regional and the same miscommunication on the start of the match happened to them as well - the solved it by adding a two seconds delay in start of the autonomous.

To verify that the same thing happened to you, do you use NetworkTables to put crucial data to the robot?

Re: Autonomous did not work at official field but ok at practice field
 

Bump! I'm just really curious if it happened to anybody else.