[Radical Pi]

Originally Posted by Don Rotolo

Somehow, the actual cause needs to be identified, we can't just chalk it up to some random event.

Unfortunately, I doubt any major debugging will be done until the offseason. At the moment, probably all of the official fields are flying around the country to be used at the various regionals. The people who wrote the FMS and know exactly how it works are probably working as hard as they can to find the problems, but until some correlation is found between the various field issues they probably can't do much to fix it. It's not like they can run down to a regional and install a "debug FMS" to monitor every little thing that is happening. It would totally disrupt the matches.

I highly doubt that there is more than one major issue with the field. From what I've seen and heard, the non team-caused failures seem to have some sort of domino effect, causing other robots to fail somehow. Perhaps there is one little bug with something a team does on their robot, and it cascades across the field to other robots.

I think it might actually be a good idea if the beta teams could get together and play on an early build of the new FMS for the season. The entire point of a beta is to figure out how to break a system so it can be fixed, and the beta would provide a perfect opportunity for this. You get to try out new features, have the resources of teams who are pretty much writing the documentation on the system and know what works and what doesn't, all trying to "break the field". It's a perfect chance