[apalrd]

Assuming you are using two KOP joysticks:

If your drivers like tank drive, we implemented tank-like solution for our crab-drive last year. Basically, we used both Y-axis as a Tank Drive, then used the average X axis to determine the translation angle. When translating at more than 45 degrees, it would turn the front/back pairs into tank drive (instead of the right/left pairs). It worked really well, since our drivers had been trained on tank drive and liked it very much. To implement this, you would use Mecanum-Polar with the Direction as the average of the X-axis multiplied by 90 (to turn the -1/1 into -90/90), Magnitide as the average of the Y-axis, and the Rotation as the difference in X-axis over two.

I would recommend against the "wheelie-bob" since it is not designed to be set while driving, and would be hard for your driver to adjust on-the-fly. Also, you should be aware that it has a range of 0 to 1, not -1,1.

Another thing you could do, you could use the atan2 of left js for a translation angle and the right stick as an arcade drive, that seemed to work well for us in testing. To implement this in LabVIEW, you could use Mecanum-Polar with the Magnaitude being the Y-axis of the right stick, Rotation being the X axis of the right stick, and Direction being atan2 (in degrees) of the left stick.

It all depends on what your driver wants..

@patrick - It is not the language but your understanding of the language that makes things easy or hard. Some people prefer LabVIEW and find things very easy to use, others like C++ or Java.