What to do when your robot loses Comms

[Bryan Herbst]

As someone frequently assisting with robots dropping out on the field, here are some things I wish drivers would not do:

• Unplug the ethernet cable to their driver station
• Restart the driver station software
• Restart the driver station laptop

I understand the frustration. I also know that for most teams, the most immediate feedback available is simply that the driver station can no longer can communicate with their robot.

However, unless you are pretty confident that one of these three things is the problem, doing them makes it much more difficult to diagnose and solve the problem.

The key reason these things hinder troubleshooting is that the FMS cannot talk to your robot if it cannot talk to your driver station. As long as your driver station is rebooting or unplugged, we can't see whether the radio has reconnected, the roboRIO rebooted, or that the field itself is indeed causing a problem.

All too often I see a momentary loss of comms turn into a much more prolonged loss of comms because a team panicked and decided the best course of action was to reboot their laptop or the driver station software.

Instead, take a deep breath. Look at your robot (and the more detailed diagnostics tab on the DS) to determine what the problem is. If your DS can still see the robot's radio, then doing anything on the laptop most certainly won't help. If you can see your radio and see no lights on it, again, you can't do anything from the driver station to fix it.

As a bonus, if you start trying to use the feedback indicators on your robot to help you, you are much more likely to put those indicators (such as the radio and the RSL) where you can actually see them. This in turn makes it much easier for the field staff to see them and help you.