Re: one control stick or two?
 

I'm inclined to agree. 1293 had one stick this year for driving, and BOY was it a pain in the wazoo to get that joystick to center! We couldn't get the darn thing still in both axes for quite a while, then had to remember which joystick was which when we plugged it up, since our arm controller was calibrated differently.

Your mileage, however, may vary.

<edit>I should point out that 1293's setup was the classis skid-steer setup, with shopping cart-ish casters on the other wheels.</edit>

Re: one control stick or two?
 

I would have to say that it does depend on what type of drive your using.
When i was a driver/operator for 461, I used a few different configurations for driving. When we had our hybrid/omni/crab drive we used 1 stick and a throttle. I liked that alot although i also liked driving that one without the throttle. When driving a tank style drive base though i cant say enough about the controllabilty of using 2 sticks, in my mind it really give you the most accurate and effective control over your robot.

Re: one control stick or two?
 

On 45, we used 2 to drive 2 to operate. Our engineers talked to the drive team, from what I heard and figured out the easiest way to control it. If you have ever seen our arm I don't think theres a way to use just one stick. HAHA! If you want to see a pic of the arm go here.

-Kyle

Re: one control stick or two?
 

Team 237 has basically relied on a tank style drive and two joysticks since the begining. We did have it switchable one year between two or one stick but found 99% of the time the drivers used two sticks. I'm not going to say one is better than the other because as everyone else pointed out it depends on the driver(s) and the design of the robot. What I do want to mention is what Jonathan mentioned and I quoted. We had the same issue where the robot would "drift" because of the motors running in opposite directions. What we did is install a "jack shaft" on one side between the motor and the gearbox. What this did is allow both motors to run in the same direction and thus the same speed.

Re: one control stick or two?
 

That stick control toggle thing is what I wanted last year. That, IMO is the perfect tank drive system. As for the motors running in the same direction, usually what's done to remedy this is having a change gear of the same size and pitch as the last gear, which it mates to on the end of the problem gearbox, thus reversing the direction of rotation and equalizing speed.

Re: one control stick or two?
 

i would imagine that you could splice in the cable for the second joystick so that you would only be using one port (so then it just comes down to the driver's preference and nothing else).....there are a lot of available inputs....haven't ever tried it, but I smell a project coming on....

Re: one control stick or two?
 

Yes, you can splice it. Our team did it. We went with two joysticks, spliced the x of one into the y of the other. Of course, this means you only read front and back position. Worked fine. If you have constants pointing to it, it doesn't even make programming harder... :D

Re: one control stick or two?
 

Yes you can do that. In fact, I made a very wonderful box which spliced joystick ports 1 & 3 together to make room for 2 joy sticks and our arm operating unit. I also created a passthrough for the antenna. (If the port numbers are wrong, thisi is from memory)

Everything worked fine... Expect that the IFI guy flipped out about the antenna passthrough... Just an FYI for everyone... Don't mess with the antenna port (and before you flame me... I'm sure that, that is listed somewhere in the rules...)

Re: one control stick or two?
 

We used a toggle switch mounted on our control box to change between 1 stick and 2 stick control. The modes were called pilot and tank drive respectively.
We found that most people thought they were better with pilot mode. However, after playing with the robot for long periods of time they were much better at tank drive. It seemed that they had an easier time avoiding obstacles in tank drive.

Re: one control stick or two?
 

thanks for all the great input guys, i will be sure to forward this to my next team meeting.