Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesCH95
As a (relatively) old-school driver I liked single-stick arcade control for FRC robots. ...
I absolutely cannot stand 'tank drive' where two joysticks are used. It forces the driver to do the drive 'math' in their head, something a computer is MUCH better suited to do. I never felt that it was intuitive, fluid, or an efficient use of controllers. I know some people/teams have been successful with it, but I can only imagine how much more successful they could have been with any of the controls described above.
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I too am somewhat old-school, preferring single-joystick arcade for things like the Descent series, several racing games and a whole slew of flight simulators from Falcon 3.0 to Lockheed's F-35 simulator. Yet those are all first-person simulators with relatively accurate perspective-based flying modes. Except for Descent*, they are also simulators where going in reverse and/or 0-radius turns are not plausible.
Personally, when driving robots in 3rd-person, (SeaPerch, FTC, FTC, QuadCopters, and even a R/C fork lift), I find it far more intuitive to do the 0-radius turns and the forward/reverse via 'tank drive'. I also know that not every turn is 0-radius, particularly in warehouse operations where 0-radius means a large movement of the load at the extremes of the robot. In these situations, I can most definitely maintain finer direct tank control over the object than any software (that isn't fully autonomous with 3D sensing capability) under two conditions: (1)the inputs are scaled to 'S' curves rather than linear (2) I can maintain visual contact with the vehicle and the objects around it. QuadCopters, of course, are a bit trickier since there are a variety of types of flight control available and usually full autonomous is almost always preferred.
Yet this isn't an argument for/against tank drive - but rather an anecdote that each driver
will have preferences after trying the different styles. Hopefully the software team isn't force-feeding something to the driver, but rather letting multiple potential drivers try out the different modes.
*Come to think of it, I could probably write a joystick emulator that converted 2-joystick 'Tank' to Descent's 1-joystick 'Arcade' to see what how the experience changes.