Motors unresponsive - restart firmware without restarting the robot?

Sometimes when testing code on the robot, something will crash. When this happens I’ve noticed a lot of times the robot won’t respond to any future commands until I restart. Any best practices for avoiding this, or is there a way to restart hardware firmware without restarting the whole robot?

Hi @cpaxton, welcome to the Stretch Forum!

We haven’t seen this issue but we’d love to learn more so we can resolve it. When it happens next can you try a few things:

  • Is there a zombie process holding the USB resources perhaps? Try:
    • ps aux | grep python
  • Are the USB devices on the bus? Try
    • stretch_robot_system_check.py
  • Reboot the USB system. Try:
    • RE1_usb_reset.py

If you can post your findings here that’d be fantastic.

–Aaron

Thanks, will try this next time it happens!