ARENA Fault

[Mark McLeod]

Certainly the control/field system interaction has grown complex, and there are far too many places and ways gremlins can interrupt normal robot operation. It's not like the IFI days when an expert on the full system was delivered with each field. Even in the IFI days, although they look rosey two years later, not every robot death on the field could be or was explained.

Nowadays, without a single source supplier, it's mostly luck if a Regional ends up with a volunteer or two with the necessary skills and experience to chase down and troubleshoot team issues with the field. With technical volunteers scarce in any case, to find one free to roam between the field and the pits to follow up with team troubleshooting is indeed rare.

I worked the NJ Regional running between the field and the teams to track down obscure problems that teams were having and do the same thing at the Long Island Regional. Part of the reason teams tend to blame the field when their robot stops is the black box nature of what FMS supplies. It's common for teams to blame the field, because one of their motors didn't work (but it worked in the pit!), or if their robot takes off on it's own.

Almost without fail teams who blamed the field did not look at their own multitude of status lights and couldn't give me any useful information. They couldn't even tell me what the RSL was doing when their robot failed. I had to be there on the field to analyse the problem and provide a correct diagnosis (correct diagnosis being one that finds a problem that would cause the symptoms).

The art of troubleshooting is something we mentors need to teach more of, but I've come to realize that many mentors don't have good troubleshooting skills either.