Thank you Chris for confirming my quick study!!
We call that type of interface, "RC Car steer", because they are independent sticks (used with your thumbs).
Chris's design is more like a modern RC car where you have a throttle and a wheel on the side of a gun like stick... sounds like he has it laid out flat though? mini steering wheel then?
Either way, they are independent up-down and left-right axes where you cannot inadvertently bump one when doing the other. I'd call all of them "RC car" steer.
We also used speed encoders and stiff proportional gain to enforce the selected turning angle... At that point it felt like a highend RC car (linear turn angle response), except that it really slowed down in the turns. We put neutral axis steer within a deadband of zero speed. The problem was that the stiff gain was a serrious battery killer and we ended up going open loop during tele-op.
One of my objectives in software for team 302, is to push the actual driver interface to the drive team to program, or at least become an itegral part of its development. If we have multiple drivers, they can have different "crew stations." One driver can have tank steer and another RC steer, and different buttons for "turbo" and "crawl", or this year's "spin throw". Different joysticks with different dead zones... the trick is to create a module which generates the same high level commands.
This architecture is shown a little bit in our VIRSYS example code... where among other things, we will be driving a virtual robot before it's built and able to practice anytime/anywhere.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ghlight=VIRSYS