Take an exit with dignity

[dtengineering]

Last year, in Seattle, we inexplicably lost mobility in our second quarter-final match.

Our alliance partners did a great job of going on without us, and with our help might have been able to force a third match. Might... we were up against a pretty good alliance.

In any case, we tethered up after the match and everything worked fine. Just as it had in our previous matches, practice field work, etc. We have no proof, however, that we hadn't done something weirdly wrong that didn't bother our robot in all the other matches, but did in this one. There was no evidence that it was the field, but there was also no evidence that it was our robot. The only evidence was that something didn't work right.

The problem doesn't seem to be one of leaving the field "with dignity" or not, but rather that the robots and FMS have reached a level of complexity that makes it very difficult to know what went wrong. If we can't diagnose a problem, then we can't solve it.

Jason