What controls do you give your drivers to operate your robot's drivetrain? I'm not a programmer, so though I'm sure the technical detail would be useful to other, I'm personally asking more about the user interface/experience itself. Especially for more complex drivetrains (e.g. crab/snake/pivot), how to you control and present these additional degrees of freedom to your drivers?
I ask this specifically because my team made a
4-wheel independent pivot drive this year. It's a great drive train and has a lot of potential, but we're still experimenting with how best to control the additional DoFs. We currently have crab and snake drives, a center twist and a ball pivot. Mechanically we can handle automobile and tank drive, absolute and relative crab twists, and X-bias snake as well. None of us, including the drive team, is really sure how to most efficiently and intuitively present all this to the driver.
We work with their feedback (I'm actually a drive coach, not a programmer), but I'm willing to bet there are a lot of options we're unfamiliar with. We spent this season using Halo-like Xbox controls; unfortunately our driver doesn't play Halo. (We're inclined there's another solution besides simply changing this.
) Any input is much appreciated.