Drive style
 

How do you drive your robot?

A game pad i.e (Xbox or game pad, or anything else)

Or

Joysticks

Or

Something cooler

Re: Drive style
 

Also, if you have something nice, like some special control.

Standard is tank.

Team 302 does a special rc mode, where on our game pad, the left thumbstick is universal control for both sides for forward and reverse movement. The right thumbstick is for turning.

Re: Drive style
 

When it comes to Mecanum wheel definitely the gamepad you have front back right and left with your left stick and right stick is your turning so it is just like playing a 3rd person shooter (no pun intended) this year. Now if you have a standard drive with six or eight wheel drive I love the two joystick tank drive.

Re: Drive style
 

1515 controls the drivebase with a Joystick/Throttle combination and controls all additional subsystems with a touch screen OI.

Re: Drive style
 

We use a standard Logitech controller, with some special controls that change from year to year. This year a lot of our buttons control automatic functions on the robot. (Ooh, automatic! :D)

Re: Drive style
 

Team 842 adopted the pistol grip rc controller style of driving last year and had amazing results with it.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/30639

It's ease of use is amazing as anybody with a little bit of practice can start driving relatively easily. We are going to be using it this year as well.

Re: Drive style
 

That's really cool. Although i would never do that, im asian, i like my controllers. Haha it must be really different to drive that though, thats really cool.

Re: Drive style
 

I agree. Last year we had the Mecanum and the driver ran it like he was playing Halo. This year we kept the X-Box, but have skid steer. Our driver seems to be doing well with it.

Re: Drive style
 

My team this is using joysticks and an io board with switchs and toggle buttons for preset functions

Re: Drive style
 

This year, our team used two Xbox 360 controllers to control the robot, one for driving related functions (drive motors, ramp-lowering pneumatic piston), and one for shooting functions (loader, shooting speed). The drive system was controlled with a single joystick (arcade drive), and the other one was left unused. In previous years, we've done arcade drive with a single Logitech Attack 3.

Re: Drive style
 

I like 2 joysticks because you get much more throw than on a gamepad. This really helps with differentiating between low and high speed, and makes it easier to match the joysticks if doing tank. It's too easy to let one thumb off a gamepad stick a tenth of a second before the other and cause your bot to turn every time you stop.

Re: Drive style
 

We use a Joystick and a custom button board powered through the eSTOP. We do arcade drive through the Joystick (with a few button features) and then control of the gun/conveyor/bridge tipper/sweeper through the button board. We find the button board easy to use (both for our drivers and for small kids/sponsors at demos), neat and fairly attractive.

Re: Drive style
 

We use an iPad

Re: Drive style
 

Our team in the past has used joysticks, but we switched over to game controllers ever since we had "hardcore" (for lack of better term) gamers for drivers.

We have two drivers, and they both use separate game-pads. One for driving and shifting gears, and another for manipulator devices (acquisition device, kicker, shooter, etc). It is whatever the drivers feel more comfortable with; some tend to be better with joysticks than a game controller, and vice versa.

Re: Drive style
 

We use joysticks, our team is used to them and we like to have more buttons. We don't have any hardcore gamers that use game controllers.

Re: Drive style
 

772 was using an xbox controller at the begining of the season. But we switched to a joystick. We foun we had more control over the robot with a joystick. Also for the xbox controller we used the left thumbstick for forward/reverse movemnet and right thumstick for right/left movement, which isnt that great. With the joystick you can simply point in the directoon uou want your robot to go, an it will go there.

Re: Drive style
 

We have always used joysticks, usually the logitech extreme 3d pro. We like having more buttons and a greater area of motion for more precise control. This year, we also used the Saitek X52 throttle, normally used in flight simulation, for our shooter controller to give us precise power control.

Re: Drive style
 

We use a Steering wheel and a Joystick along with 254's Cheesy Drive code (Which makes a big difference).

We love it so far!

-RC

Re: Drive style
 

We got to use a Peregrine glove this year. It was cool, but not intuitive enough. We wound up switching to a joystick to control the arm.

Here it is.
http://www.theperegrine.com/product/
I'm sure that it would be amazing for PC gaming or a different FRC game (like last year's where our controls were much simpler).

Team 1649 had a tank drive and we used two joysticks for the wheels. On the joysticks we had three buttons one that made the robot reduce it's speed by 40 percent. Then the other two buttons were used to control our bridge manipulator. One button was use to lower the other to raise.
The second control system we had was a button box. We split the controls among two people so we can have two things happening at the same time. On the button box we had three buttons one for our ball intake, the second to reverse the ball intake, the last to control our kicker.

Re: Drive style
 

We've been looking into 254's "Cheesy Drive" recently. From what I hear, it offers great maneuverability combined with simple, user-friendly controls. It uses a steering wheel to turn, and buttons for turn-on-a-dime left and right turns.

Re: Drive style
 

It's just software, and doesn't necessitate the use of a steering wheel. It just wants a steering input (could be a joystick) and a throttle input. This could be mapped to a single x-y joystick, or more commonly split between two joysticks.

The main goal of it is remapping arcade drive to allow better turning while driving than normal.

Re: Drive style
 

Have you folks run both setups? (with and without a wheel) I saw 1323's at champs and they seem to love it. Are there distinct differences in effectiveness of the code between using sticks for steering or a wheel?

edit: also, what control interface was Cheesydrive originally intended for?

Thanks!

Re: Drive style
 

The current iteration of the "Cheesy Drive" system was developed in 2010 for both the two stick setup (which we have used recently) and the wheel setup (which 971 has used). The code development was driven by Austin Schuh, mentor for both 254 & 971 and 971's drive coach.

A lot of it is driver preference. From 2004-2008 we used a wheel and from 2009-present we have used two joysticks. I don't exactly remember the reason we switched. I find the two stick setup more intuitive but that's just me.

Re: Drive style
 

Ah okay, I figured it would be mostly driver preference. Thanks Nick.

Re: Drive style
 

I've seen lot's of good posts here about Joysticks vs. Gamepads, and other devices. I understand the pros and cons of both. I'd like to hear some opinions on what your favorite stick/gamepad/other device is and how you use it. For example, Do you use a stick with throttle or twist grip? If you use a button box, how many buttons does driver one or two typically end up using? Do you use special function switches? Potentiometers? Do you have a preference for different types of buttons or switches?

For us we tend to use Joysticks. (Logitech Attack 3's) We experimented with the Logitech F310 gamepad, but found our drivers tended to have better control with joysticks. We vary from arcade to tank style to drive the robot, but driver 1 seems to end up with two joysticks either way. We found that driver two generally has little use for the joystick so we went to a button box with arcade buttons that worked very well.