Is an FPV camera allowed for the drive team? Do you know any teams that have already used in the competition?
We have one of these Driver Station Heads Up Display 7 in. LCD Monitor - AndyMark, Inc on our drive station on a flexible stick as of last year and used a camera on our robot so the drivers could see game pieces in front of the intake. Having the display up closer to their face meant they or the coach are a bit more likely to look at it during a match than looking down at the laptop screen.
Wireless links other than the field radio are not allowed in competition, but you are free to (and many teams do) put an ethernet or usb camera on the robot and have it transmit back to the driver station via the robot radio.
Unfortunately the lag in this approach (sometimes much more than 100ms) is way way worse than a commercial FPV camera and headset (less than 20ms).
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But an FPV camera like a drone camera, which moves with the movement of the head, do you know if it can be used or if it has already been used?
You can’t wear a headset that will cover your eyes, but if you had a little headband that held a screen and had an IMU that might be legal. But a COTS FPV headset is illegal because it hides your eyes behind the screens.
E101 *Personal safety comes first. All team members must observe the following safety practices throughout the event: A. wear safety glasses (only ANSI-approved, UL Listed, CE EN166 rated, AS/NZS certified, or CSA rated non-shaded) while in and around the playing FIELD and in the pit area. Lightly tinted lenses are permitted provided eyes are clearly visible to others, but reflective lenses are prohibited.
If they can’t see your eyes it’s illegal.
As far as the camera moving you can get a pan and tilt camera, but you’d need to link and track your head motion to it and have that mobile screen still
Google glass 
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Essentially yeah, I’ve thought about this exact thing a number of times. They do make transparent OLED so you could make one yourself finally. The old way was to remove the polarizers in the screen and then readd it to the lens of the viewer. It would work but made it hard to see in many cases and reintroduces the tint dilemma again. Other methods were based around reflecting the screen but you lost alot of clarity and brightness that way.
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Clear-lensed safety glasses, worn under some other device, would not be prohibited by that rule.
Everyone can guess about the intent, and make choices accordingly, but enforcement of E101-A related to equipment other than what is specifically mandatory would seem to have to be on an advisory basis.
Also, note that it is an event rule, and therefore the guidance for its applicability is different than a game, arena or tournament rule.
Pit admin and field staff would not let you on the field with a VR headset over your head even if you had safety glasses underneath. Too much can go wrong if the screens or cameras stop working. You will be blind until you can take it off. I can’t see how a POV headset is any different
They will lean towards the side of take it off or don’t come to the field/pits.
I was thinking about a VUFINE display over the googles, but it probably wouldn’t get past the “I can see your eyes” rule.
This might actually be okay, it’s much better than an FPV rig. I can see one whole eye and only part of the other eye seems hidden. They can definitely still see around them of the device malfunctioned.
Sure, if you walked to and from the field wearing it, someone might stop you and advise that you perhaps can’t perceive your surroundings clearly enough and that you are becoming an obstacle and putting yourself at risk. That conduct and resolution would not be relevant to your team’s matches.
But that’s different from putting it on when you take your position behind the drivers’ start line, and taking it off when the end-of-match sound is played. If you have the ability to abate the impairment instantly, and you are in a fixed location and benefit from the assistance of teammates, what compelling reason or rule makes this impermissible?
And it’s also wired, just need an hdmi port.
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If you have a typical FPV headset on you cannot see what is happening around you. You might be comfortable and happy but you’re totally oblivious to anything else.
If a note is shot over the field wall accidentally and was coming at you will you see it with the headset on? You would with something like Google glass or @LPryor s suggestion because your peripheral and real world vision isn’t restricted completely. A full headset will not allow this, and passthrough is not enough because it can fail. How it acts in an unpowered situation matters most from a safety perspective. To me the drivers stations are where you need the most awareness of your surroundings. Not the least. You are closest to where the machines are operating and the polycarb wall is not the end all be all of protection
There’s a pretty good one in the list of things you ARE allowed to bring to the field.
With that said, there are quite a few ways that this device could then be brought within the rules.
The other option would be a military or industrial HoloLens. (I don’t think the standard HoloLens had shatter proof visors) you’d also have to figure out how to transmit the data video feed over usb.
If a person turns their back to the field, will they see the projectile? It is not illegal to turn around, but it might be risky.
Presumably R902 does not mean 1 and only 1 driver station display. Per the 6.3.2 blue box, there’s a weak presumption that it is a control device and thus part of the operator console. Fair enough that you or a teammate would have to connect the data cable after autonomous if initially worn, or don it after autonomous if not.
You could argue R906 is relevant (“OPERATOR CONSOLES shall not […] cause an unsafe condition”). If a 30 lb operator console is heavy enough to bruise you if it falls off the shelf when a robot hits the wall, is it unsafe? (The blue box only says maybe.) If wearing a head-mounted display during the match is as dangerous as turning your back to the field, is it unsafe? In either case, what caused the unsafe condition: the device, the person who put it there, or an external force?
As usual, though: “The intent of this manual is that the text means exactly, and only, what it says.” This means we can’t extrapolate regulations that aren’t clearly evident from the text, and, if we nevertheless perceive a hazard, have to use other methods at our disposal to deal with it.
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Try it out and report back the results.
I think though for the reasons covered above no one has successfully pulled this off. It feels like it is on the borderline of several rules and I wouldn’t want to risk a major part of the robot design and strategy on something I’m not 100% sure is legal
Neither of which is what I was referring to.
G302 is. You asked what compelling or reason makes it impermissible. G302 bans anything that introduces a safety hazard, even if it’s otherwise legal per G302–I don’t see anything saying that that doesn’t apply to the operator console. In this case, the hazard is the reduced vision and/or the extra wire. With that said, I’m not going to push too hard, because there’s a lot of history of stuff being worn by drivers–it’d have to be pretty egregious to even think of disallowing.
I would also take some minor issue with one of your previous statements:
13.1 General Rules
The rules below apply throughout an event, i.e. from when Load-In begins to when Load-Out is complete.
Universal Violation Note: A violation of any Event Rule will result in a verbal warning. Egregious or subsequent violations will be addressed by the Head REFEREE, the Lead Robot INSPECTOR (LRI) and/or Event Management. Teams should note that egregious and frequent violations may be shared with the Judge Advisor which could lead to disqualification from awards.
Additional rule specific violations, if applicable, are listed with their corresponding rule.
Two things to take from that: One, it applies at all times, no exceptions. Two, the first thing that will happen is that you have a discussion with whoever’s calling you on it, hopefully along the lines of “yes, I’m on the way to fix that now”.
With that said, there are a couple of things that I think should be addressed.
First: The Hololens trial a few years back. @troy_dietz I think can shed more light on it, but some teams were allowed to use a VR headset on the field during matches. It was a single-year trial, and to date nobody’s really followed up. There were some special considerations for that.
Second: I’d like to have a go at the initial question and how to do it legally.
Initial question: Is an FPV camera allowed? Answer: Yes. And a lot of teams use them for specific applications. Camera on the robot, streaming over the robot’s network, to the driver station, to whichever monitor/extra screen(s) are being used by the team for that purpose. That’s the short version of the requirements, I’m a bit too lazy to go dig up the rules and others have already covered them.
Followup question: “What about one that moves with head movement?”
That’s actually pretty much the same answer, with a few extra details–and as far as I’m aware nobody’s done that.
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Ignoring how to get the data from the head movements for a moment, you’d simply send the data for where the camera needs to point at to a pan-tilt camera mounted on the robot, and have the robot move the camera. I don’t think it’d be too terribly difficult (particularly using servos for this one). Basically: Move head, pick up data, send to robot, camera moves, view comes back.
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This would probably induce quite a bit of lag, on top of the normal camera lag. I would be very cautious about who I put under the VR for this, as I’m not sure that scrambling the human sensors is a good thing… Oh, and I’d test before competition.
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The headset itself. Needs an IMU, capability for wearing legal safety glasses (over, under, or as the screen), and be able to be removed/put on quickly for 6.3.2 reasons (and, for that matter, G401/G402 reasons). The question to be asked is, if the visor of the headset is opaque/heavily tinted, would that matter for the purposes of E101A or any other rule? My response to that, to be honest, is actually: As long as the safety glasses are worn, and the headset is only used during the match (when the driver isn’t going to be moving around much anyways), I don’t see a reason to disallow. UNTIL there’s a pattern of the driver tripping over stuff during the match, at least–once that became apparent then I think there’s be a talk about this whole “safety” thing.
tl;dr: As long as safety glasses can be worn under/over/around the headset for a pan-tilt camera, I don’t think there’s a rules issue until something unsafe is proven. However, from a technical point of view, there’s a lot of risk/engineering that makes a fixed FPV camera a better option for most teams. (Or, as in the case of @marshall and 900, multiple fixed cameras that can be toggled between.)
As a professional drone racing pilot, there’s nothing I’d love more than for FIRST to embrace FPV and get an opportunity to support advancement of the technology behind it (or at least ride along for the rapid technological growth currently being experienced in the sport).
Alas, the only times I’ve put FPV on an FRC robot is during off-season, practice sessions, etc and never during a competition due to rules already stated in this thread. The only times I’ve experienced FPV in competitive robotics, so far, is Battlebots.