[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by Hazelhoff

Thanks for the tip. I'm trying to make a training program from scratch to have done by Thursday. Is there any more tips for drills, training set up, or anything else along those lines?

P.S. That's a funny story about your ex-girlfriend I bet that went well

Simple obstacle courses are good to start with, especially those that require driving backwards or driving at yourself. These drills are great for driving the robot in a variety of orientations relative to the driver. We try to incorporate game elements into obstacle courses. In 2015 we asked the drivers to perform some combination of grabbing a can, driving around some obstacles, then scoring the can.

Originally Posted by lark95

If you have two robots that you can drive at the same time then i would recommend have two potential drivers go against each other. Have one drive try to get his robot to touch one wall and have the other try to block him, or something like that. There is really nothing better than driving against a real person rather than a course.

This is a great exercise. We place a game element in the middle of a driving area and have one robot try to touch it with the other robot blocking it. This is great for learning how to juke, roll, or otherwise break past another robot. For these drills we sometimes put a mentor on the defensive robot to push the difficulty up a notch (many of our mentors are experienced drivers). We've also done this drill with other teams.

Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell

For this I personally don't even do drills, it's more a matter of knowing the student personalities and how they normally act.

To quote a part of my original post, so one facet isn't taken out of context, we use "one-on-one conversations with students, and general observations of their behavior and interactions" as a significant part of the selection process. Exercising calmness during drills is used in conjunction with knowing their personalities.