Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

So now that worlds has ended i was wondering what stuck out to everybody the most about drivers/driving. What were some things that were new this year and things that could be done better next time? What went well?

For me one of the biggest things was that if you plan on doing any amount of driving through a camera you better do everything possible to reduce lag. Also communication was key between drive teams and needs to be more that just yelling to come do this or go do that. Maybe designate one drive coach before the match as the head coordinator or something like that.

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

Having a short robot, it was not fun trying to back through the sally port. The most I could do was have the operator flip up the defense manipulator. Other than that, I must have hit one of the sides of the sally port more than I successfully made it through it.
Visibility as a whole wasn't exactly great this year.

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

The way we worked was we had our coach giving high-level strategy decisions, and our operator worked with the driver to help with details. What often happened was the operator watched the camera feed and spoke to the driver to adjust, while the driver watched the robot.

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

I'm sure it was more fun than driving last year.

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

You got that right, whole lot more fun acutely getting to hit other robots!

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

My main takeaways:

Vision was incredibly difficult. Whenever the portcullis or drawbridge were chosen, it was very difficult to see through to the opposing courtyard. Our camera came in handy for not only shooting but also opening the sally port with our little lexan arm.

Defense was very very difficult to deal with for us. In the two matches we played against heavy defense, lining up shots got very hard.

Overall, it was really fun. Crashing over defenses was great and it brought up some really cool moments, most notably pushing a stuck alliance member over the cheval de frise, getting 2 crossings at once.

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

This.

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

I personally loved it compared to last year, nothing like trying to push a partner under the lowbar and having your 10in tiller tires climb their bumpers and onto the bot only for them to tell you that they'd never done lowbar
-_-.
That said it beats stacking totes and driving over noodles

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

Boulders getting stuck in the low bar was the most annoying thing ever. Whenever we wanted to cycle through the low bar with a boulder and get a low goal we couldn't if we didn't want to get a tech foul. It was very annoying as it could make cycle times twice as long or even worse get a boulder caught in the wheels. The first low bar fabric probably would have never had this problem...

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

I'm on the drive team for my team and it was hard to see over the Sally Port because our robot and team are both short. We did have a camera but sometimes it would not work correctly so we had to stand on the tips of our toes trying to see our robot. This is where our spy came into play, I would look over to her and she would try and help me point the robot in the right direction. This was a better game than last year to drive at even though the boulders were a pain if they got stuck under your robot.

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

So much better than wall-e simulator to drive, heartbreaking at times but NEVER a dull moment. Loved it. In the future I would have liked to see defences that were a little harder, so you couldnt buy a set of pneumatic wheels and cross 5 of the 8 defences instantly. So great though8

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

like many others here we had issues with the sally port, but our biggest issue was running over boulders, spotting boulders and communicating positions was a huge part of the effort of our drive team

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

I think the three things that caused the most problems were boulders, communication, and vision. I think the biggest problems with the boulders was them getting stuck in the low bar and getting stuck under the robot. Communication was a issue because there were 2 driver stations on one side of the tower and 1 on the other making it difficult to communicate to both of your alliance partners at once. The last major problem was like many have said vision especially for smaller low bar robots like us where the only thing we could see when behind the Sally port was the tips of our shooter wheels. There was also an instance when we were playing defense from driver station 3 and we went all the way around the tower to play defense and I could not see our robot at all since the tower sticks out past the wall.

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

We were having many problems with vision especially when coming through the sally port. However, we were able to borrow flexible landscaping flags from another team and attached them to the back of the robot. This was immensely helpful in seeing our robots position on the other side of the field. I have included a picture below. Thanks again team 4627.

Re: Thoughts on driving in FIRST Stronghold
 

We had a similar solution to that problem. We went with 1/8" polycarb pieces that we cut long enough to provide visibility while also attaching them in such a way as to not extend beyond 15" while crossing the low bar. We also color coded them with gaff tape, yellow on one and blue on the other, so that our driver could easily see what orientation the robot was in.

As a bonus, it turns out they actually gave a lot of character to our robot and the team loved that unique and simple feature. We were actually able to give out some of our spare Wigglydoodads (as they were later officially christened) to other teams at champs as well.