The importance of testing

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

Our team has a system of testing every mechanical action of the robot after we change the battery before a match to ensure everything is working.

Team 45's "preflight checks" are done before changing the battery. This conserves power for the actual match, but it does leave the potential for a battery problem to be missed.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Team 45's "preflight checks" are done before changing the battery. This conserves power for the actual match, but it does leave the potential for a battery problem to be missed.

I understand that doing a system check and not wasting power to use in a real match, but 2.5 minutes of play does not drain a battery and neither will adding at most 60 seconds of testing. Like you said, battery problems can be missed and it is nice to have the assurance that when you shut it off everything works and you do not have to change/fix anything.

[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Team 45's "preflight checks" are done before changing the battery. This conserves power for the actual match, but it does leave the potential for a battery problem to be missed.

Ditto for 177. We always do a 30 second functional test before changing the battery and sending the robot out. The drivers are trained never to leave the pit without it and or drive coach won't let us forget it either.

[Chris Hibner]

Oh boy...

I want to tell two stories that REALLY illustrate the point the original poster was getting at.

Before 2001, there were no divisions at the championship. Each year there were 200-250 teams in one large competition, with the top 8 getting to pick alliance partners for the eliminations (that might have been expanded to a top-12 in 2000, but I can't remember).

In 1999, my team at the time (308 - Walled Lake Monsters) were ranked 4th with one match to play. We were paired with Team 1 (The Juggernauts, one of the eventual winners of the championship) and we were going up against a couple of lesser robots. All we had to do is have a mediocre score to jump into the #1 spot. Just prior to the match we had to do some pit work on the drive train and the pit crew plugged the motors in such that the front motors were fighting the rear motors. Thanks to Team 1 we won the match, but due to us not being able to drive, we had a poor qualifying score. We dropped to the 10th seed and we weren't picked for eliminations. One mistake sent us from the #1 seed to watching from the sidelines. That killed me. (note that we went to the match without testing because of the fix taking too long and we didn't have much time to make it to the match)

At the 2000 championship, we had a similar situation. The pit crew had to unplug the drive motors in order to demonstrate something to some judges in the pit. Like in 1999, we had to rush to make our match and didn't do a function check. When the match started, we quickly realized that the motors weren't plugged in. We salvaged a few points by using the arm on the robot to drag the robot to the ramp. That was match 6 of 7 and we were ranked 6th going into that match. We wound up with a poor qualifying score in that match and we finished ranked 14th. Had we had a mediocre score we would've ranked around 7-8. Once again, we weren't picked and we watched from the sidelines in eliminations. The only solace is that the presentation to the judges apparently worked since we won the Leadership in Control award, but I would have rather been playing in the eliminations.

I am one of the biggest advocates you will find of having a pre-match checklist that gets done just before pushing the robot out of the pits. It's unfortunate that it took such horrible experiences to make me that way.

[Radical Pi]

We actually (try) to keep 2 checklists for pre-match. One is a no-power test, which is mainly just visual inspection (broken wires, pneumatics closed, physical damage, etc). If we have time, we go for a power-on test of all the systems. I also do a quick test of the control board right before the match once we plug the cypress back in (it gets taken out to increase the classmate charging rate)

[CoachPoore]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Team 45's "preflight checks" are done before changing the battery. This conserves power for the actual match, but it does leave the potential for a battery problem to be missed.

We had an issue a couple of seasons back with a sensor cable that got dislodged when the battery was changed, so now we always do our checks with the new battery.

Noel

[BEEKMAN]

At our second regional this year, we wer convinced that we we're having significant battery issues, because the robot couldn't strafe. It was only untill 1.5 hours before pit closed on thusday that we learned our mechanum wheels had bent due to all the banging after coming off a bump. Luckily we were able to show some amazing team work and fix all for wheel in time for pits to close....

now we have to check the wheels after every match (we also bought new ones, as the ones we were using were used from 2007)

[Eugene Fang]

Team 604 does a few things to ensure robot reliability. Some of it is a lot of excess, perhaps unnecessary work, but it's served us really well this season; we haven't had a single "dead robot" issue. We probably would have gotten away with a lot of our precautions, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Before the competition:
-Design the robot to be robust and electronics to be clean. The latter helps greatly during the competition to debug any problems and reduce the risk of electrical failure.

During the competition in the pits:
-Pre-match power-on test and test all functions (We use an old battery, then switch in a new one)
-Keep a list of battery rotations

During the competition while queuing:
-Check the Classmate joysticks before each match (We're afraid that it won't hold USB1, USB2, etc.). As an FYI, if you go to the "Diagnostics" tab on the classmate, and pull the trigger of your joystick, the green LED under "USB Devices" should turn blue.
-Visually inspect the mechanical systems
-Check the tightness of the nuts holding the large AWG wires leading to the PDB

Once the robot is on the field:
-I push in every PWM on a victor, push the modules into the cRIO, and push any other small signal wire that might jiggle loose. It takes about 15 seconds, and I do it while the robot is booting up, so I don't get yelled at by the field crew =)
-Check the lights on the radio (for both power and Ethernet comms), any breakout boards, sidecar, and victors.

[aechmtwash11]

Number One problem in our rookie year at BMR was not having our Ethernet cable from the bridge plugged into crio..

After almost every match we would unplug it because we were having so many programming issues.

On top of this, it wasn't easy to get to the cable once we put the sides on, no Velcro all self tap screws we learned the hard way