After much experimentation with many crazy control schemes, i have come to pretty much the same conclusion as Mr. Wittlief. If you do anything to smooth the controls, they no longer do
exactly what you tell them too. Doing exactly what you tell the bot to may or may not be a good thing depending on the experience level of your driver. There is no substitute for a skilled driver. I have found that there are really only two things that are alot of help:
*a nonlinear curve that is used to map joystick values to PWM values. This compensates for various oddities of unknown origin which are discussed at length
here.
*The second thing that helps is closed loop feedback as mentioned above. If you search these forums or google for "PID" you will find a massive wealth of information.
There is one final thing that i have implemented in cases where inexperienced drives will be driving the bot and that is acceleration limiting. This prevents people from doing stupid things.