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AdvantageKit#

AdvantageKit is a logging framework developed by team 6328 (Mechanical Advantage).

What is Logging?#

Logging is recording some or all of the state of the robot — such as the current values of variables, inputs and outputs, and which Commands are running — so that it can be played back and analyzed later.

Why Log?#

Logging helps with debugging by letting you see exactly what was happening to the robot and what it was doing when something broke. This is especially useful at competition, where you have limited time and testing ability to diagnose problems.

Real-world example

At Houston 2023, team 8033 had an issue in their second quals match where the grabber stopped responding to input. Using the logs from that match, they could see that the sensor readings of the grabber had stopped updating, which pointed to the CAN bus connection to the grabber having broken — a diagnosis that would have been nearly impossible without logs.

Why AdvantageKit?#

AdvantageKit logs every input and output to and from the robot. This means the full state of the robot can be perfectly recreated from a log file.

Diagram of AdvantageKit data flow

It also means that the same inputs can be run through modified code to simulate how the robot would have responded — AdvantageKit calls this replay. For example, team 6328 used replay to diagnose a vision-tracking issue: they adjusted their tracking algorithm, then confirmed with replay that the change would have produced the correct outputs given the original match inputs.

AdvantageKit is a mature, actively maintained framework and is closely integrated with AdvantageScope, a log and simulation viewer also built by 6328.

Drawbacks#

  • Performance overhead — logging every input and output uses CPU time each loop on the roboRIO.
  • Architecture change — AdvantageKit requires an IO layer beneath each subsystem, which takes additional effort to write. However, this same IO layer makes simulating subsystems significantly easier, so it is generally a worthwhile trade-off.

Note

8033-specific usage of AdvantageKit features is covered in more detail in the following lessons.

Resources#

Resource Link
AdvantageKit docs docs.advantagekit.org
AdvantageKit repository github.com/Mechanical-Advantage/AdvantageKit
AdvantageScope log viewer github.com/Mechanical-Advantage/AdvantageScope
6328 logging talk 6328 logging talk (YouTube)

Examples#

Exercises#

  • Follow this tutorial to add AdvantageKit to your kitbot code. (coming soon)

Notes#