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.