[monty1540]

Our strategy has generally been to try and have people on the drive team that can easily understand what is going wrong if the robot starts malfunctioning. When something goes wrong on the field it's good to have members on the drive team that know the robot inside and out from both the software and hardware sides. On the hardware side, if something breaks mechanically, you want someone who can understand what broke, and can quickly decide whether the issue necessitates disabling your robot. On the software side too, if part of the software is not functioning correctly, having a programmer on the drive team may allow you to come up with a solution to the issue on the fly, or help the software team understand what to fix when the robot gets off the field.

Looking on towards elimination matches, these experienced people are also the ones you want down at field level so that they can fix any issues in short-order between matches.

In other words, having programmers and fabrication members on the drive team has been our strategy in the past, and has been quite effective/advantageous for us.