Quote:
Originally Posted by Kims Robot
I highly doubt you can diagnose an FMS problem via a webcast. I know of only a handful of people that are even remotely qualified to do that - and they are called FTA's. I presume you are not one, thus I'm not sure how a robot dying on a field (Im guessing thats what you mean by "spin out") at their very first event can be assumed to be an FMS fault. Many teams have not finalized or fixed or even know if their code really works yet.
What evidence do you have of this? I hate to dredge it up, but the Einstein report showed that the majority of the issues were actually team faults. I highly suggest you go back and read it if you haven't already. It will give you some great insights into things that your team should not do if you want to have a successful fully running on field season.
Should there have been better diagnostics? sure. But its not as simple as saying "the FMS ended our season." Maybe in your case it was one of the rare instances it was true... but I don't see how we can/should panic over seeing a couple of dead robots on a webcast.
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To fill in the blanks about what exactly happened to us last season, it was the third elimination round of the quarter finals, autonomous had just ended when suddenly the robot began to spin wildly in circles and continued to do so until the end of the round, eliminating us from the competition. The team was incredibly distraught and was disappointed to have lost due to something so completely out of our control.
My
panicking
was meant to be taken with a grain of salt and was extremely sarcastic, hence the memes and star trek GIF. However, my questions about the integrity of the FMS last season (and possibly this season) is quite serious. While I make no claims to be able to diagnose an FMS failure over the web I can say with a high degree of certainty that our failure at WPI last year was not based on a fault in our code. We functioned normally for the entirety of the competition and had not experienced any previous failures. The FTA's at the event looked over our watchdog logs and our robot code at length and were incredibly helpful in trying to deduce what had caused our problem. They agreed with us that it was not an error in our code and even tried to get us a rematch to no avail. We have tried on multiple occasions to replicate our spinning on the field and have been unable to do so.
I trust enough in the folks behind FIRST to believe that the FMS will be a non-issue but our experiences last year will never be too far from my mind.