THE HORROR! THE HORROR!

FIRST General Forum
#6

I highly doubt you can diagnose an FMS problem via a webcast. I know of only a handful of people that are even remotely qualified to do that - and they are called FTA’s. I presume you are not one, thus I’m not sure how a robot dying on a field (Im guessing thats what you mean by “spin out”) at their very first event can be assumed to be an FMS fault. Many teams have not finalized or fixed or even know if their code really works yet.

What evidence do you have of this? I hate to dredge it up, but the Einstein report showed that the majority of the issues were actually team faults. I highly suggest you go back and read it if you haven’t already. It will give you some great insights into things that your team should not do if you want to have a successful fully running on field season.

Should there have been better diagnostics? sure. But its not as simple as saying “the FMS ended our season.” Maybe in your case it was one of the rare instances it was true… but I don’t see how we can/should panic over seeing a couple of dead robots on a webcast.

#7

16 and ourselves had a buggy match at Lubbock…where we both sort of spun after losing connection. A few times titanium was spinning in auto in Elims as well…

From what I’ve seen this is sort of a popular failure…why I wonder do all the robots react like that?

The unplanned circle dance
#8

What language did you guys program in? (Curious)

#9

We had very few problems at Hub City until the championship finals. In the first match our CRio decided to reboot in the middle of the match and in the last match it rebooted as soon as autonomous started. Please don’t start flaming me, I am not making excuses or blaming anyone or anything. I am just stating the facts. I know there was at least 2 others that had the same problems and the suggested fixes were cleaning the CRio and changing the black connector to the green one.

We use labview and did not make any code changes before the hiccups started.

Mr. B

#10

Being the programmer last year, and the one on disaster control at the time of the incident at the WPI Regional last year, I can speak in greater detail to the issues we experienced.

It was round 3 of the quarterfinals. Only mild issues with initial FMS connection were experienced at any point prior to the issue. Auton executed as expected. When transitioning from Auton Disabled to Teleop Enabled, the robot began spinning in a tight circle, and was not responding to any driver commands.

Later inspection from the FTA, CSA, as well as a National Instruments rep yielded no result. The code was ruled out as a non-issue.

EDIT - We later attempted to replicate the failure using FMS simulation software provided to us by the CSA. All attempts at replication failed.

The unplanned circle dance
#11 
To fill in the blanks about what exactly happened to us last season, it was the third elimination round of the quarter finals, autonomous had just ended when suddenly the robot began to spin wildly in circles and continued to do so until the end of the round, eliminating us from the competition. The team was incredibly distraught and was disappointed to have lost due to something so completely out of our control.

My :ahh: panicking:ahh: was meant to be taken with a grain of salt and was extremely sarcastic, hence the memes and star trek GIF. However, my questions about the integrity of the FMS last season (and possibly this season) is quite serious. While I make no claims to be able to diagnose an FMS failure over the web I can say with a high degree of certainty that our failure at WPI last year was not based on a fault in our code. We functioned normally for the entirety of the competition and had not experienced any previous failures. The FTA’s at the event looked over our watchdog logs and our robot code at length and were incredibly helpful in trying to deduce what had caused our problem. They agreed with us that it was not an error in our code and even tried to get us a rematch to no avail. We have tried on multiple occasions to replicate our spinning on the field and have been unable to do so.

I trust enough in the folks behind FIRST to believe that the FMS will be a non-issue but our experiences last year will never be too far from my mind.

The unplanned circle dance
#12

I’m told many problems at Lone Star were caused by multiple teams trying to run cameras at 640x480 at 30fps. Or in one case, TWO cameras at that rate. Teams have been instructed to throttle down to 320x240 @ 15fps and things have calmed down a good bit.

#13

May I say that we were one of those teams in Florida who was “spinning out”, and that was not due to FMS. It was our vision code that kept spinning because it couldn’t find a target (we are still having problems, but whatever). Unfortunately, this happened during autonomous and we had discs in the bot. The judges weren’t very happy about our spinning, disc-shooting robot (but they were understanding later). We call this the “Death Spin”.

On the other hand, we HAVE had some problems with communications. In our last two matches, we suddenly lost comm right after auto ended. we grabbed the controls, drove to the feeder,loaded discs, turned around, and died. The driver station said that we had comm and code, and yes, we do have the most recent version. In case you want more details; we program in Java and use the Smart Dashboard. Our robot worked for the whole day until our last two matches, and we can’t remember changing our code majorly. Our robot works great while tethered with the ethernet cord. We had to reduce the resolution of our camera because the control system was delaying so much that we accidentally fell over.

Other teams seem to be having this problem and we have consulted with the control system experts who have told us this: Java has a 5-sec delay when it resets the gyro (andymark) which our whole drive system is based off of (orientation to the field). We moved the gyro zero function into the disabled code but haven’s been able to test it yet. Our code might be crashing. We need to get to the arena early to test tomorrow.

If you have suggestions, that would be great, and I hope that we can resolve this issue soon (1st match tomorrow!).

5 second delay on gyro resetting?
#14

I understand your point, but I believe that you are overreacting just a little bit. In particular, “THE HORROR! THE HORROR!” might not be the most appropriate title on this thread.

As far as I know, there were no significant field issues at FLR this year. That is the only regional I know about for sure right now. I think that things will get fixed by FIRST as soon as they can, but for now there should probably be more work devoted to fixing the automatic scoring system. I think more teams are getting burned by not knowing what the score is at the end of the match as opposed to FMS issues.

We will see more as time continues but for now I think that FMS is doing a pretty good job overall.

#15

The only robot at FLR that randomly spun in circles was 1551 in our first match, and that stopped when we disabled our gyro…

#16

This actually sounds EXACTLY like the situation that much of the Einstein report pointed out, as well as several other teams noted during the season. The most well known of these probably being 118. They functioned “completely normally” until the elims in CT. They also functioned “completely normally” until Einstein. Again, I reference the Einstein report. I highly suggest you **go and read pages 12-13 **[and really the rest of it, but specifically those pages if you don’t want to learn from the whole thing].

And I appreciate that different people have different senses of humor, and that your graphics should have indicated your tone of sarcasm… but as the saying goes “TOO SOON…TOO SOON”.

#17

We had problems also with all robots shutting down and having to play a rematch.

Not sure why frc still uses wifi, should move to independent channel RF.

#18

What?!?!

#19

Our spinning was due to a failed battery. We had 2 separate instances in elims where batteries showed 13 volts on the charger and dropped to 6 volts within seconds during autonomous.

To the best of my knowledge we had no problems with the FMS in Hub City.

#20

I thought bandwidth caps were in place…?

#21

batteries showed 13 volts on the charger and dropped to 6 volts within seconds during autonomous.

Out of curiosity did you ever figure out why the batteries behaved in such a strange way?

#22

I can only tell you what the FTA mentioned to me in passing. I’ll note that he didn’t say and I didn’t say that the cameras were causing issues for teams other than the ones running the cameras.

#23

This is almost always a failed cell in the battery - or many failed cells.

We use the West Mountain battery tester to test our batteries. We found several this year that had normal voltages initially, checked good on our battery beak, but fell off after 5-10 minutes of testing fairly sharply.

#24

On the one hand I want one of these. On the other hand I don’t want to spend the money. Maybe I’ll spend some time this offseason working out some software to use a Black Jaguar and some power resistors as a poor man’s version of this.

#25

Buzz’s dance was not due to FMS. Due to possible programming issue plus the fact that we had to keep safety pins in to keep the feeder up ans therefore within starting envelope. We did not have enough pressure in the system after the last match and refs would not let us power up to recharge.