Touch Screen with the Driver Station?
 

Hey CD!

I was having a discussion with some of my teammates during lunch today about some things that we would do different next year. During this talk, we thought about touch screen support, especially on the driver station dashboard.

For example, A driver station with a touch screen laptop/slate (say a Lenovo Flex 14) was used for a driver station. During the Teleop Phase, a driver could use controls on the touch screen dashboard like radial dials, sliders, etc, to control the robot. These controls would most likely be for speed. For a game like Aerial Assist, the driver could control shooter angle or shooter power.

My team primarily uses NI LabView, so something like this would be easy to implement for next year. Programmers would build a touch-friendly dashboard for controls. What are your thoughts? Do you think this would be useful for controls?

Re: Touch Screen with the Driver Station?
 

I'm the Chairman's/Outreach manager for 1540, so this isn't coming from any sort of real-world experience...

but that sounds AWESOME. What could potentially make it even cooler would be if it was completely gesture-based - i.e. there's nothing controls-related displayed on the screen, but instead no matter where you performed a given gesture it would work. Two finger swipe to control shooter speed, three fingers for arm control... the possibilities are endless. That would also free up the screen to show useful data - battery level, current draw from motors, etc.

If you do end up building this, I think all of us here on CD would love to see it. Good luck!

Re: Touch Screen with the Driver Station?
 

You need a keyboard (or at least the ability to press the F1, Enter and Spacebar keys) for safety reasons. Enter and Spacebar aren't used during in FMS mode, and F1 is just reinitialize joysticks, but you'll need all 3 when the driver station isn't in FMS mode. This doesn't necessarily preclude the use of a touchscreen; you just can't use a computer that doesn't have a physical keyboard.

Re: Touch Screen with the Driver Station?
 

Now there's some outside-of-the-box thinking! I love the idea of gestures. It would be tough to program though, and like you, I'm no programmer (Mechanical/Electrical for the win!).

Re: Touch Screen with the Driver Station?
 

This can be done, I was working with a team with a touch screen laptop and the controls on the dashboard can be access by touch. I wouldn't develop controls on the touchscreen, because it would get cluttered and in the 2 minute madness, it could provide an unnecessary distraction. Being a programmer, I don't like having too many controls for your operator and driver to control. Clear example would be my team's last year robot for Ultimate Ascent. There were so many moving parts that the operator would have been lost controlling it.

Re: Touch Screen with the Driver Station?
 

We've thought about this kind of interface for ours as well, and almost implemented it this year with one of the touch screen classmates. However, we quickly realized that without any tactical feedback the driver would have to look down at the PC to do anything. Taking your eyes off the robot during the match is just asking for trouble. We decide to instead use a custom control panel with very high quality buttons so that the drivers know when a command is issued from feel alone. We're going to keep doing research on this as well as other input methods (like a leap motion or similar device), but plan to stick to the panel with real buttons for competition.

Re: Touch Screen with the Driver Station?
 

Our FRC OMI experiments indicated that non-responsiveness of a screen due to sweaty fingers makes touch screens a non-optimal solution.

A secondary issue is non-responsiveness of the application due to the vision processing that's going on in the same process (though we do our own custom driver's stations).

Then there's the whole issue of looking down.

Re: Touch Screen with the Driver Station?
 

There are teams that have done this already, and have competed with a driverstation with a touchscreen.

Most notably last year one team had a touch interface with vision processing, where they would select the goal on the screen within the camera image to go after.

This year, we developed a custom dashboard writen in python and talking to our Java based Robot (one of items contributing to winning us the controls award at the district level).

The dashboard displays information as well as allows for the user to select different auto modes, hit a button to do other macros for the bot etc. It will run on a touchscreen laptop no problem, we just don't use one.

In addition to the controls on our dash, we have redundant controls assigned to buttons on our F310 joysticks. The operators love those and choose them over the dash (so they simply use the dash as a status display most of the time) because they never have to look down, and they can move around to see the action better.

A touchscreen dash is definetly something viable. However you need to weight the cool vs practical. What will allow you to beter control your robot behind the glass, and make your operators lives easier so they can focus on the game, that is what is most important. I would say try it out in the off-season, and if it is deemed beneficial, hit it hard next year.

EDIT: Even if you deem touchscreens will not benefit your drivers, touchscreen applications to support the performance of your FRC team are not out of the question. This year we had a student lead team develop a scouting app with a very sleek GUI(also a python front end) which runs on the windows surface tablets. These were used by our scouting team to enter data indivually on the touch based app, then synced to a single database for later viewing by the drive team during scouting. This application of touchscreens is where I would see the touchscreen FRC market take off the furthest.

Hope this helps,
Kevin