Re: Control FTC4314's robot over the web
 

nerds!

:)

Fun stuff, I got to drive for a little bit. I went forwards and backwards. That's how I figured out which way the robot was pointing.

Re: Control FTC4314's robot over the web
 

davidthefat,

The purpose of the exercise was ...

1 To learn the details needed to implement minimal robot telepresence via a WEB app.

2. To benchmark and analyze performance limitations of our approach adn change that approach over a couple of iterations of improvements.

3. To possibly inspire interest at FTC and FRC in terms of a telepresent mode during game play.

4. Share the knowledge so other teams can have an easy starting point in doing this themselves.

5. To just do it and have some fun having people from half way across the country or even the world amaze themselves with "action at a distance....".


Some times it was real slick and at other timse it was trying to have telepresence with a bot on the moon and the several second latency on the video.

So we are done public testing for tonight and they are working on improvements already. We had over 120 people tune in via ustream tonight and had some 14 or so viewing at one time. No idea how many people drove.

Thanks everyone that helped.

Frank
FTC 4314
FRC 39
NURC 0x27

Re: Control FTC4314's robot over the web
 

Just a quick update for when the applet come back online later...


- Added CPU friendly mode toggle (lowers applet FPS)
- Added real time FPS counter
- Changed applet layout. All buttons now appear alongside the camera feed, hopefully now more people can see the full image and controls at the same time. Also moved Left/Right buttons closer together.
- Removed user checking*
- Added WASD key controls
- Added Arrow key controls


* To anyone who had trouble getting the robot to move yesterday please try it again as this hopefully fixed the main problem. The way it was set up people idling in the app were sending html requests to check the active connection IP to the Samantha 2 times per second... If you have 10 people with the applet open that's one request every 50ms! The poor little Samantha controller buckled under the pressure. Ah well, lesson learned. One more reason to start work on some intermediary server software. :P

Hopefully the new version will be online sometime soon later today. Testing at 2AM I was able to get a solid 30fps from the camera. :ahh: Hopefully it functions at least half as well with users farther away.

Also, what kind of features would the CD community find useful or interesting in an program like this?

Regards,

- Austin

Re: Control FTC4314's robot over the web
 

Let us know when it goes live again!

Also a suggestion, maybe you could have the robot time out after 5 minutes or so, that way one person can't control the robot for hours at a time.

Cool project.

-Brando

Re: Control FTC4314's robot over the web
 

^ This. Put a countdown on the applet to let users know they have a time limit. I'm sure this will become more and more popular as the thread gains more views.

I can't wait to try it out!

Re: Control FTC4314's robot over the web
 

the applet already has time restrictions. each person is disconnected after 120 seconds(the countdown is displayed on the applet). Also if they have been idle for more that 15 seconds they are disconnected.

I will create a page that shows what the applet looks like when we have it offline so the link on the first post loads correctly.

Re: Control FTC4314's robot over the web
 

Does anyone have an idea on how to notify people when the robot goes live? I will post on here but that would not reach many of the users.

Re: Control FTC4314's robot over the web
 

Some sort of Twitter account that people can follow. If it doesn't go up-and-down often, a Team's existing account wouldn't be a bad idea. Otherwise, Twitter is free, so a dedicated account wouldn't take much effort to create.

Maybe e-mail notifications. Create a page where people can sign up to receive an e-mail when the system goes up.

Re: Control FTC4314's robot over the web
 

We also put video on ustream so that if you are not driving you can watch. In the ustream chat we will notify ~ when we will be putting the bot on line.
the ustream feed is at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-robot

There are too many risks so we can just leave the Telepresence demo unsupervised. As we are building today there may be long periods of what looks like nothing happening with people working in the garage.

Tentatively looking at 1 pm AZ time (GMT- 7) today to put the bot on line for say 30 minutes of driving.

If you get to drive, please just blip the controls. Holding the buttons down will just ram the bot into stuff and possibly stall/damage motors. If we see this, we will take the bot off line. So please drive it like you are driving the last surviving Mars rover. The robot con only get on the tippy ramp going forward. This is because the right front of the bot has a deflector to tip the ramp downwards as the bot approaches the ramp. So try to approach the ram straight on. no driving on and off the sides of the ramp.

Summary: Don't drive this like a 4x4 off road RC truck. Drive it like a Mars rover. i.e. blip the control...then wait for something to happen. Blip again....etc. Don't hold button down for more than 1/2 sec and things will stay safe. Please do not chase the pets.

Frank
FTC 4314
FRC 39
NURC 0x27