[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by Killraine

the field team at Chesapeake seemed to be assuming that communication problems were robot-side. Our team couldn't do anything to prevent and/or fix the problem and the people running the field can't be expected to troubleshoot every robot that can't establish communication. What can we do in this kind of "no-fault" situation that left all of the students on our team feeling dejected and helpless?

I am NOT an FTA, but I did sit next to them for three days. They can do a lot more than assume that it's a robot problem, since their control console sees lots of information on the field and the robots. I heard FTAs telling teams that their main batteries were low, that their driver's stations were flaky (replaced on the spot), that their radios weren't working right (replaced on the spot), and that they had bad Ethernet cables (replaced on the spot). I was really impressed with how much they knew. Only when the radio link was working, all the monitored on-board components were reporting OK, and the field was reporting OK did I start a match with a motionless robot. For what it's worth, the problems weren't spread out -- it was the same handful of robots over and over again.

I am very sympathetic to your plight (kids on my teams have failed to start in a finals match three times in the last two years), but I don't know what else the field crew can do when all the diagnostics are reporting "Good" but the robot doesn't move. I DO know that the FTAs in Seattle sometimes spent five minutes trying to get a single robot working before some matches, and were always disappointed when a 'bot DNS'ed.