Tournament preparation and walkthrough

Preparation before the Tournament:

• Prepare one laptop that will be used to operate the robot during the entire event.
• Make sure communication with all robot computers is setup properly:
  • Public ssh keys are available on the robot computers for easy ssh access
  • (Optional, not sure if this is still necessary with the current network setup) Hostnames and (fixed) ip addresses are in the /etc/hosts of all computers
• Prepare a consistent way of terminal (terminator) and desktop layout. Make sure that you can always quickly find the terminal where you've started start, free-mode (or challenge) etc. programs and where you are editing files/managing git.
• RViz is working, config is suitable and easily accessible
• Robot dashboard is working and easily accessible

First day on the Tournament:

• Make sure the network setup is proper and stable
• Make a map of the arena (gmapping)
• Model furniture and place it in the world model
• Arrange network setup
• Train the object set (with robot and/or seperate camera)
• Test the basic functionalities: speech, object recognition etc

Between challenges

• Make sure you exactly know when to perform which challenge
• Discuss a 'test schedule' in the team meetings: what can be tested? What not yet? The robot should be running as much as possible.
• Make sure the developers develop incremental to keep things testable and quickly iterable.
• Don't dive too deep into challenge issues. Instead, feed them back to the one responsible for this challenge (or back-end) and ask for assistance whenever necessary.
  • Keep a list of issues you've encountered and regularly check with the challenge responsible whether an issue has been fixed.
• Regularly update the robot and keep it clean: no modified files are allowed.

Challenges

• Approximately 45 - 35 minutes before the challenge is scheduled, notify the team that the 'window' of pushing new features is about to close and necessary pushes should be pushed ASAP.
• At 30 minutes before the challenge is scheduled, notify the team that no-one is allowed to push anymore without explicitly discussing this with the operator. If a bug pops up during the final test, the fix can be pushed and pulled onto the robot without getting any additional updates.
• Software on laptop is up-to-date and built.
• Cleanup the robot: tue-status should not show any changes on any robot pc. Do a final tue-get update and tue-make
• Run the challenge one more time to see everything is still working.
• Park the robot at a convenient location near the arena and hook it up to the power supplies to make sure all batteries (of the robot and the operator laptop) have sufficient energy for the challenge. Think about where you want to sit during the challenge.
• At the moment supreme, typically three people are around: the operator, team leader and the one who is responsible for this challenge. Only the operator touches his laptop.
• After the challenge: inform the team that the pushing is allowed. If people start pushing right away, update the robot before continuing.
• After the challenge: re-start testing ASAP (if the arena is still occupied, consider testing challenges that take place outside of the arena).