paper: Using a Virtual Robot Model – Testing and Debugging Autonomous Code Through Simulation

[Nadav Zingerman]

With computers, every once in a while you see something that makes you think "I could have done this, why didn't I think of it? It would have made my life so much easier." Now is one of those times.

[Chris Hibner]

Yesterday was our day to get the autonomous code dialed in, so I figure I would post a follow up to report how it went, and how the simulation-based testing and debugging panned out.

Prior to yesterday, here is what we did:

- About 8 hours spent coding our autonomous sub-VI.
- Using the simulation tool, about 4-8 hours spent testing, debugging, and tweaking the autonomous sub-VI.
- Then at various stages, another 4-8 hours for coding, testing, and debugging various "good ideas" we had pertaining to autonomous (all via simulation).

Yesterday, we finally got to test it all on the real robot. Here is what we did:

- about 1 hour was spent dealing with issues in Disabled.vi because we didn't initialize everything correctly.
- about 15 minutes spent in PeriodicTasks making sure calculations were being performed correctly.
- about 20 minutes of testing to be sure the signals were all in the correct orientation (i.e. postive went the proper direction, and negative went the proper direction).

That was all setup in order to start the autonomous subVI testing. In our Auton2010.vi, here is what we did:
- about 1 hour was spent dialing in control gains for all of the various PID loops and controls calculations (and there are quite a few for us).
- about 30 minutes spent running some simple autonomous scripts to verify the robot performance against the simulation.
- about 15 minutes spent writing and testing an autonomous script for use in the competition, which worked flawlessly the first time.

Summary:

During robot testing, we made ONLY two changes in the auton2010.vi:

1) Control gains
2) I removed a feature that I thought was a good idea, but decided it was ill-conceived.

Everything else regarding auton2010.vi was done in simulation. As it was in the past, it was a huge success again this year.