What is the strangest issue with a robot you have ever seen?

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by EricH

2016, SCRRF Spring Scrimmage. 4276 goes just about 100% on finding the portcullis in autonomous. They were aiming for the rock wall, which happened to be next to it. They did eventually get that mostly worked out... but it did crop up about once an event after that.


I've also heard of an E-stopped robot continuing to wander slowly across the field. (This was over 10 years ago.) Seems the batteries were surface charging, and the controller had enough voltage to drive the motors--slowly--but not enough to read an E-stop signal from the radio.

In the original firmware for the 2007 modem there was a bug that could cause robots to "hold last value" and not see the E-Stop. We had modified the AM Shifters of the time to include a 3rd higher gear, and were testing them out on the shop floor of the vocational school we worked in. We had noticed some weird behavior, but we were just playing around and most of the driving was being done by students without much practice so we kept playing around.

There was a nice long straight away, with the auto workshop at the far end. We were zooming down the straight away when the driver noticed the robot wasn't responding... he hit the E-Stop about halfway down the straightaway, and the robot didn't stop. It continued until the top of the electronics board collided with the undercarriage of a truck in the auto workshop a few seconds later. The universe definitely conspired against us on this one, as the Victors on the electronics board were exactly at the right height to be "the impact zone", and since it was our prototyping electronics board we had 10 Victors on that board -- all of which were destroyed.

[Conor Ryan]

Does anyone remember the story of Harlem_Shake.vi?

[dmelcer9]

So last year, our lifting mechanism for the totes kept twitching up and down. This would happen whenever the bot was enabled, even when the controller wasn't connected. We calibrated the motor controller, but that didn't fix it. We went through the lifter code line by line and there was nothing there that could have caused the twitching. To this day, we still don't know what caused the twitching, but it doesn't matter because we cannibalized the control system for our 2016 bot .

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Conor Ryan

Does anyone remember the story of Harlem_Shake.vi?

Not when it happened, but I have read about it through highlight posts. Two words: Price Less.

[mman1506]

We've semi consistently had issues with motors "jerking" while the robot disabled with no one touching the driver station. I've been told it's impossible but it has happened multiple times on multiple robots.