Wearables in FRC
 

Alternative title: How I learned to stop worrying about anonymous accounts and love off-season CD...

For the past few seasons some of our students have engaged in some research projects around wearable technology. Both haptic feedback for the drivers as well as connecting our drive team to sensors for data acquisition and analysis.

How do you amend the current rules for FRC to make it more friendly for this kind of research and technology usage? Currently, drivers must stand away from their controllers and can't be connected to them. Wireless usage in the driver stations is prohibited as well.

What kinds of wearable technology are you or your team using today and how are you using them? Is anyone using fitbits and the like to track their drive team throughout an event?

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

This year I used a smartwatch at competition for the first time. I found a few really good uses. (BTW I was coaching when I used most of this)

1. I turned on match score notifications on the Spyder app and used the notifications on my watch as a way to keep track of where we were in the match schedule. This provided a more accurate measure than time for keeping track of when we needed to cue. I found this extremely useful, especially in places like District Champs and Worlds where you had no idea what was happening from the pits or practice fields.

2. I also had Slack notifications turned on which made it easier to see messages immediately. I also experimented a little with using it to easily view scouting info for pre-match driver meetings. Our strategy guy would message the info and it would be right there for me. I found this nicer than having to open my phone and then open the app, but it was really just a convenience thing.

I have not really used my watch for on-field applications, partially because I have been really cautious with the rules. I tried to not look at my watch at all on the field because I did not want to break the rules.

Pro Tip: This is not really a wearable thing, but one amazingly useful trick I figured out this year is to set a screenshot of your match schedule as your phone lock screen. It only saves you a few seconds each time, but times 100 times over 3 days it really makes a difference.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

What watch we're you using?

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Alternative title: Why 900 is one of the coolest teams in FRC.

So the current rules seem to be in place for a few reasons-

1. So people don't "cheat" and control their robots during autonomous
2. So people don't accidentally control their robots during autonomous

As is, however, there have been exceptions to this rule, including Kinect/Cheesyvision feedback in previous years, and the simple rule that says you can save your driver station from falling if that's likely to happen.

I think there could be some clause in the rules that allows for cool technology like this to be encouraged with special permission from the LRI or something like that, with the honor system applied here, as it already is in so many areas of FRC.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Moto 360 with an iphone, so I am sure people with more integrated systems can find using a smartwatch at competition even more useful.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Don't they have a big wearables trade at the Championship every year? I'll trade you a 2363 wearable for a 900 wearable.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

You know, I don't have a 2363 wearable... We should make that happen.

Here is some food for thought:
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagle... ?language=en

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

At one time, there was a short delay after autonomous, it was probably for scorekeeping, but such a delay could be used as a chance for drivers to connect wearables to the driver station without missing match time. Seems like the simplest way to tweak the rules to accomodate wearables without drastic changes to controls or match play.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

You mean like one of those FPS Feedback vests? I guess feeling like you got shot would be great motivation to not miss...
Back on topic, however, closest I've heard of for "wearable" FRC tech were the old pseudo-HUD glasses that seem to have mostly fallen out of favor. The concept was cool enough though; stick a LED on a pair of safety glasses or a clip and it turns green when you're on target, red of you're not.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Personally, I find my smart watch incredibly useful at competition. Match alerts and score up did Ares are only a small part of it, but they let me track what's going on at my event, as well as other events with teams I care about, all in a minimally invasive way.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to me, as an LRI, is the quick and easy communication it gives me with the field during practice day. While I'm running around in the pit trying to get teams to pass inspection, I can get short text messages from the field alerting me to issues I need to solve. "Team 9876 bumper number", "team 6789 starting config", and other such messages allow me to quickly and easily address teams that maybe haven't even come up to start inspection, and get them working on fixing things.

And of course there's the step tracking... It's always amazing to see how much I walk around during competition!

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Yeah, but competitions also inflate my average and my watch makes me walk more on other days because of it.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

This year at a competition we were asked that the drive team not wear smart watches. As none of us had one, I assume it was something they were asking of all teams.

That Pro Tip is a good one. I would say that I'm going to use it, but I'm sure to forget by March of next year. I'll be happy if I remember by June of this year.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Did you hear that at a driver's meetings? I never heard anything about it at my competitions and I never was confronted about wearing one. Since no one said anything, I just did not USE my watch on the field as the rules say rather than not WEAR it.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Head ref asked before the start of a match. They probably saw somebody wearing one and were being proactive about the outside communications rule.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

I imagine that sometime in the near future, FIRST is going to have to directly address the legality of drive team wearing smartwatches. As more people start to get them, it is going to get harder to enforce the no use policy. FIRST will either need to ban them on the field or set specific rules as to what is and isn't allowed in regards to them.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

We use the rumble in our xbox 360 controller to notify the operator when we have a ball in the intake. The LED's on the robot change color too, but sometimes the LED's are hard to see across the field (aka Drawbridge).

-Mike

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

We've done that too. We'd like to do more but it's difficult at the moment though we have some ideas about how to make it happen.

Fun fact, in 2014 we were beta testing the new control system and one of the promised features was an update to enable rumble on controllers. It didn't come out when anticipated so we filed a bug report/request to get it added with a reason of "our driver is blind". I don't recall the answer we received but it was pretty funny at the time.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Oh man, have I been waiting for a thread like this for a while. So this year, the programming team for 540 used wearables for the drive team itself. We used the Vuzix m100 smart glasses which run on Android as a substitute for the driver station's dashboard. Essentially, information such as whether we had a ball in the intake or if we were aligned to shoot were sent to the Vuzix smart glasses and were displayed as lights in the Android app we developed. This implementation was AFAIK legal because it used a wired connection (port forward from laptop to smart glasses using ADB interface through a USB cable) and the secondary driver didn't put it on until after autonomous ended (took him like one whole second). I'm super excited to have led this project and hopefully our team will use such technology in future years to provide intuitive data to the drivers! Don't hesitate to PM me about how the smart glasses were implemented because I'd love to explain it and hopefully increase the usage of cool new technology in FRC :) :)

EDIT: For anyone wondering what this looked like to the driver, imagine holding your phone in landscape mode almost an arms length away in the top right of your FOV. It was very natural for the secondary driver to glance up to check if we were aligned to shoot or if we successfully picked up a ball into the intake

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Could you use a FatShark RC viewer to replace a monitor to view video feed from the robot? Here is a lik to check out the products:
http://www.fatshark.com

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

I don't think those would be allowed. The main reason is that it prevents the drivers from viewing the field which is a safety issue. We ran into a similar problem last year when developing with the Oculus Rift DK2.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Ok I can see that. Maybe smart glasses?

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

I think we're all going to need more details and some pictures.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Somebody proposed a feature to TBA to integrate with Pebble time recently. Is this kind of integration something we should pursue (maybe in tandem with more features for Android wear)?

Does somebody want to help build it (because my time is finite, sadly)?

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

This is what it looked like when the driver was wearing it, with this picture being taken before the match: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_S...QwSVBFekU/view

Here you can see the secondary driver wearing it during the match as well:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_S...YtUGFxOVE/view

So, time for some technical talk :)
We hosted network tables on our robot to which both the robot's sensors (infrared, pressure, gyro, etc.) and data from the coprocessor (raspberry pi with pi camera tracking with OpenCV). This data was updated throughout the match, and we had a jar file running on the driver station laptop using the windows networktables library to access the network tables on the robot. When setting up the Vuzix smart glasses, an ADB port forward was used to connect a port on the laptop to the smart glasses. The jar on the laptop created a socket at the same port and the Android app created using Android Studio read from the appropriate TCP ports. Then, the data was received by the smart glasses and depending on the values that the glasses received, lights were colored or uncolored on the android app.

Lemme know if any other details are requested :) :)

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Just wear a wide sweatband that you pull down to cover the watch ...

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Did the drivers connect a USB cable before each match or did they not wear glasses before the match or attach it? Did you have any issues with this with the refs? How did you guys come about the Vuzix and what's the story behind it?

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Yes, the smart glasses were connected via USB before the match began because the most time required to setup the glasses was when running the jar file. We talked to the refs at our competition and they said as long as the operator isn't wearing them while they are attached during autonomous we are fine. So, we just leave them on the driver station during autonomous.

The operator is wearing safety glasses and the vuzix smart glasses came with their own safety glasses and mount (how convenient). As you can see in that second picture (linked again: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_S...YtUGFxOVE/view), the operator puts the vuzix smart glasses on while pushing the original safety glasses above his head so that he can use the smart glasses while still being safe by wearing safety glasses.

The story behind Vuzix:
Last year (2015 Recycle Rush), I contacted Oculus to see if they would be willing to donate a VR headset so that our programming team would be able to experiment and create new, creative ways to control the robot and view it's camera feed. We even had the Oculus Rift DK2 working with stereoscopic camera feeds from two Axis cameras, but we weren't able to use it because it obscured the operator's view (safety issue).
So, this year (2016 Stronghold), I began researching augmented reality as an alternative to the virtual reality we experimented with last year. I found the Vuzix m100 as a good solution because they used Android (which I know how to program for) and had a preexisting safety glass mount. I was able to get in contact with the CEO of Vuzix (praise LinkedIn) and he directed me to one of his associates who was able to get us the m100 smart glasses with the condition that we could do some PR stuff for them (send pictures and describe what were accomplishing etc). Because we were able to get the smart glasses for free, we had the resources to experiment with this implementation of wearables which we thought worked out wonderfully.

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

Very cool and great use of LinkedIn!

Re: Wearables in FRC
 

This is literally the only successful LinkedIn interaction that I've heard of. And here I was, thinking it was just something to update when I'm really trying to procrastinate at work...

But seriously, that's a great story and a really neat use of a) networking and b) technology. Great job!