Touch Screen with the Driver Station?

[Kevin Phan]

This can be done, I was working with a team with a touch screen laptop and the controls on the dashboard can be access by touch. I wouldn't develop controls on the touchscreen, because it would get cluttered and in the 2 minute madness, it could provide an unnecessary distraction. Being a programmer, I don't like having too many controls for your operator and driver to control. Clear example would be my team's last year robot for Ultimate Ascent. There were so many moving parts that the operator would have been lost controlling it.

[ILAMtitan]

We've thought about this kind of interface for ours as well, and almost implemented it this year with one of the touch screen classmates. However, we quickly realized that without any tactical feedback the driver would have to look down at the PC to do anything. Taking your eyes off the robot during the match is just asking for trouble. We decide to instead use a custom control panel with very high quality buttons so that the drivers know when a command is issued from feel alone. We're going to keep doing research on this as well as other input methods (like a leap motion or similar device), but plan to stick to the panel with real buttons for competition.

[JesseK]

Our FRC OMI experiments indicated that non-responsiveness of a screen due to sweaty fingers makes touch screens a non-optimal solution.

A secondary issue is non-responsiveness of the application due to the vision processing that's going on in the same process (though we do our own custom driver's stations).

Then there's the whole issue of looking down.

[NotInControl]

There are teams that have done this already, and have competed with a driverstation with a touchscreen.

Most notably last year one team had a touch interface with vision processing, where they would select the goal on the screen within the camera image to go after.

This year, we developed a custom dashboard writen in python and talking to our Java based Robot (one of items contributing to winning us the controls award at the district level).

The dashboard displays information as well as allows for the user to select different auto modes, hit a button to do other macros for the bot etc. It will run on a touchscreen laptop no problem, we just don't use one.

In addition to the controls on our dash, we have redundant controls assigned to buttons on our F310 joysticks. The operators love those and choose them over the dash (so they simply use the dash as a status display most of the time) because they never have to look down, and they can move around to see the action better.

A touchscreen dash is definetly something viable. However you need to weight the cool vs practical. What will allow you to beter control your robot behind the glass, and make your operators lives easier so they can focus on the game, that is what is most important. I would say try it out in the off-season, and if it is deemed beneficial, hit it hard next year.

EDIT: Even if you deem touchscreens will not benefit your drivers, touchscreen applications to support the performance of your FRC team are not out of the question. This year we had a student lead team develop a scouting app with a very sleek GUI(also a python front end) which runs on the windows surface tablets. These were used by our scouting team to enter data indivually on the touch based app, then synced to a single database for later viewing by the drive team during scouting. This application of touchscreens is where I would see the touchscreen FRC market take off the furthest.

Hope this helps,
Kevin