[Peter Johnson]

While the commercial grade of the robot radio is definitely a concern, I see a major root cause of the comm issues being the simple fact that all of the data passes through a single point of failure: the field itself. If each team had its own DS radio (provided in the KOP), operating on the field would be no different than operating at home (or ideally, in the pits as well..). This would eliminate the "comm works in the pit, but not on the field" issue.

However, the issue is how to implement this, as the FMS still needs a way to talk to each DS, and laptops only have a single Ethernet port. I propose that a custom DS radio be provided to teams (much like the IFI system did). It would have two ethernet ports, labeled "DS" and "FIELD", but not directly bridge at an Ethernet or IP level between the two ports. Instead, firmware on the radio would only pass to/from the field port key control and logging information, ignoring all other traffic (e.g. camera data) on the DS-robot ethernet/wireless connection.

Conceptually this could be implemented with custom firmware on a commercial home router (with the isolated "internet" port being the field port), although I would hope for competition an industrial-grade solution would be provided.

If so desired, this could be combined with an industrial solution on the robot radio side as well. I definitely hope that any future robot radio solution continue to include 4 ethernet ports; this has been a major enabler to doing more advanced things with the control system.

EDIT: seems like other folks are thinking along the same lines.. I just didn't post fast enough!