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Competition Tips & Tricks
This page tries to give a better insight on how things go at a competition. Please note that these information are complementary to the rulebook but only the rulebook is binding.
RoboCup can be hectic and stressful. Make sure you have easy to read tools whether your robot is doing ok. For example, have your robot announce that its battery is running low. Also practice and setup easy solutions to these problems, i.e. have batteries on hand to hot-swap.
Visit the repository for last year's competition to get a better idea of what to expect: https://github.com/RoboCupAtHome/Sydney2019
The venue is always noisy. Do not only test your speech recognition and speakers in quiet labs. See here for an example setup: https://github.com/Slothologist/MasterThesis/blob/master/thesis_template/thesis.pdf (see p. 47-52). Make sure your robot can get over some bumps. Especially the team area is typically riddled with cables; your robot will need to drive around there to get to the arena. Doesn't necessarily need to be autonomous, but not go on E-stop because of a small bump.
Do not rely on the network in the arena or in the team area. Monitor and reduce network traffic of your robot beforehand. Setup local gits for your team.
It is advised to take this very literally. Having the robot talk about what it is doing makes life easier for the referees and volunteers.
A wireless E-stop is very very handy to have. But make sure it can deal with WiFi as background noise AND other wireless E-stops being on potentially the same frequencies. When your robot is E-stopped, you want to have it back to go ASAP. Don't just kill your software. Ideally, it becomes a pause-button. When you cut power to the wheel motors for example, keep the encoders going so your robot can still use odometry to know where you are pushing it to. Don't just cut power to your arm motors: your arm going limp is actually unsafe, you might drop something. How to do this safely depends very much on the hardware of course.
The operators may have an accent when speaking English. RoboCup is a world wide competition after all. You know your robot well and know how to speak to it. It may seem obvious, but it isn't always to a referee who has already judged 20 other robots. Test your robot with other people, maybe even people who are not as much into technology as you are.
Example of using custom operator: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HxCiXk0_5jZ6jVSMvJfEC051QJzwEQNZ
Example of door opening (default) and starting inside (e.g., Carry my Lugagge): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XPQU3NlZzrNppGmXeoPARRyScRQXdVYF
Example of requesting assistance: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1DmRJF5wgs-mfNBAL7oTLou73WNfpJ-tn
Example: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cvJl8zSjrE3cFNq_NLba5l_I3MvRq1SW
Use the entire competition and especially the poster session to get to know what other teams are doing and using. No need to reinvent the wheel.