Robotics is often seen as an exciting field, with cool devices and mechanisms doing an infinite number of exciting and bizarre applications, from drones moving large payloads to animal-based robots automating surveillance work. The limitations of what a robotics engineer can do truly lies within the extent of his or her imagination.
Nonetheless, robotics is perhaps one of the toughest fields out there. In just one system, every major field of engineering must fall in line for the entire system to work, and when that happens it is truly magical.
In this blog, we want to give you an insider perspective of a commonly overlooked aspect of this exciting industry, testing. Being such a complicated system, it is never easy to get the robot to function repetitively without fail. You always tend to be faced with the strangest of errors from a loosened nut to a hanging wire blocking the Lidar’s field of view. Troubleshooting such errors could take weeks, if you take the wrong first move when debugging. Debugging here is not just scraping through thousand lines of code; it is scraping through each hardware element while scraping through the same thousand lines of code! It is never an easy task, but that’s where the fun is!
Hence, automating even the simplest of tasks requires a dedicated effort to test the system as if you intend to kill it before it goes live at a customer site. This takes grit and discipline to do the same thing over and over while staying diligent to spot the smallest of errors. That quick look at your twitter feed could potentially cost your company millions (just an exaggeration, but you get the idea). It’s test, test, test and equally importantly document, document, document! It can be a difficult and sometimes painful process, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. The best of work is done when the work being done is truly enjoyed.
Diligent testing to provide you a great product is a big part of what we do here at Botsync. Yes, we work on exciting developments all the time, but we also keep our heads down and do some good old-fashioned stress tests repetitively to ensure that our products and solutions are safe, reliable and do what they are supposed to do.
We have been through this product development journey countless times over the past few years. So, if there is something that you are building, and would like our support through one of our robots or just some friendly advice, feel free to drop us an email, text or whatever else that you are comfortable with:) https://www.botsync.co/contact.html
blog.botsync.co 