[rspurlin]

I mentor a team that has had similar issues, and I volunteer as a scorekeeper, so I have a foot in both graves so to speak.

Most of the information we have available to us from the FMS display is the same information you have showing on your classmate. We do have the luxury of seeing it for all six robots at once. Much of what is written into the logs is the info each team's classmate reports to the FMS. So at the moment your classmate looses contact with your robot, that would be logged. Of course, the FMS doesn't know why it happened.

When I'm doing the scorekeeper job, I'm constantly monitoring both the action on the field and the FMS display. When I see that a robot's battery voltage is unusually low, I alert the FTS by radio to alert the team. They might have noticed it on their classmate display, but also might not. Likewise for missed packets and drops in robot link. Dpending on whether experience leads us to think it is most likely centered around the robot or the driver station, I'll ask the FTA to investigate while the match is still being played. I make my own written notes and cross check that with event history up to that point, to look for issues that follow teams or driver stations.

During the events, scorekeepers and FTA's have comm links back to FIRST HQ when things seem to be out of whack. In my opinion, you are making a mistake if you think that these people do not care deeply and take seriously every issue and possible bug that comes up. But FIRST is not an immense army; It would surprise most of you how few paid staffers actually make FIRST happen. Give them some credit for working many long hours. Same witht he event volunteers. I've been a part of many reviews and discussions long after the pits close about what transpired during the day. It's not uncommon for us to make a decision to reverse a DQ/red card/yellow card or replay a match the next day if we feel it is the fair thing to do.

There seems to be an assumption that the field is more complex the last two years than it was for IFI run events. I'm not sure that's true. One example is the radios. Most don't remember that IFI placed a tree of individual radios to facilitate robot communication. It was possible that one of them could fail (or the individual wires that led to them), leading to one robot losing communication while the others ran fine. Today's field has a single radio in the form of a Cisco access point which communicates with all robots simultaneously. A failure for one is likely a failure for all and thus a replayed match.

Each classmate is connected by ethernet cable to a switch in the station cabinet in each alliance station. This in turn is wired to the access point which communicates to the robots. There aren't a lot of points of failure here that could affect one team and not an entire alliance or all robots. Still, there are some and we watch those both during the match and from match to match. If I saw evidence of an intermittent error at one driver station, I'd alert the FTA and head ref and recommend replaying some matches if I thought there was any sort of field problem. A replay does not have to be done immediately.

Electrical problems can be much harder to sort out than mechanical ones. We do not replay matches when your chain breaks or your motor burns up or you forget to plug something back in. We do not have the luxury of replaying matches until the outcome is unaffected by robot design and construction issues. We also cannot do so when your programming fails or a breaker trips or something shorts out temporarily. But for some reason, maybe because those failures are sometimes not obvious (or even leave no evidence), a claim of field fault almost inevitably follows.

I share your frustration when you don't know how to fix your problems, but sometimes we don't get the information back to help you. Once the teams leave the field and begin the troubleshooting process, often they find the problem was a simple one of their own making, but don't let us know. If I did get that information, I could pass it on to other teams as best practices to keep their robots in top form. Unfortunately I usually only get feedback from immediately after the match as the FTA makes an immediate diagnosis. That said, reread this and similar threads where you'll find the variety of ways a robot can fail during an active FIRST match and try to avoid these things happening to you.