Kentwood Woes

We spent six weeks designing and building our robot. Six weeks all culminate into what is suppose to be the greatest experience your team will have each season; your first competition. Instead of this grand reception and amazing thrill of the event, our team met with disappointment and heartache. Each teams plays 12 Qualification matches. Our first time out things appears to be good. We connected to the field, our robot performed exactly as expected in the Autonomous Phase and worked well in Teleop. The second time out, however, things went very, very wrong. The robot performed in Auton, but failed to respond to input in Teleop. We flagged down the Field Engineer and he ran over to help us diagnose the problem. The short version of this tragic story is that after two engineers and a control systems lead looking everything over, the official diagnosis is "we don't know what is wrong." and "It doesn't make any sense." Compounding this failure to make sense is the fact that when the robot is directly connected to our driver's station, it works fine. The problem only ever happened when we connected to the field. This would lead a logical person to believe that the problem was with the field. I fully believe the problem was a combination of issues with the field and something in our driver's station. There is no way to verify or even test for this as we are not allowed access to the field except for matches. To mitigate this, we will completely rewrite all our robot code, re-image the robot computer and the driver's station computers. Doing this will make it nearly impossible that any issues we have be something with our software. If it fails again it is either our robot computer or something with the field. We've decided to get to our next competition as early as they will let us to test the new systems.

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