Jared - thanks very much for the "rules of thumb". Those will help a lot in refining our UI. Given how Daisy drives, I'd definitely agree your rationale is well founded! The 2 DOF per hand thing will prove interesting, but I think it's wise. We've run into the same problem as well.
Ether - Thank your for the article. I understand that one can technically parameterize
snake-like & dynamic relative twist movements for any truly holonomic drive, but I hadn't tried the kinematics for either. I've never heard of an omni bot implementing snake-like movement, but that shouldn't have lead me to ruling out the option. My oversight, apologies. Also, if you're already out there, please feel free to step forward. And link your white paper, because that's just plain cool.
I had actually intended my comment concerning snake/pivot control to ask how such bots manage their additional input (not output, sorry) variables--namely wheel orientation--in using their DOFs (or perhaps I should say freedom in general). This was a nomenclature failure on my part, sorry.
BEEKMAN - I'd be interested in learning more about your mecanum's UI mapping. The technical detail would go over my head, but the "pretty much anyone can drive it" comment is very compelling. Feel free to PM me if you're still worried about thread hijacking.
Decent II: Interesting. I'll bug our video game gurus and see if they can dig this up (legally).
Joysticks: I have to agree with eagle, while your wrist may have less manual dexterity than your thumb, the joystick scale is much larger than a game controller's analog sticks. (Though I'd guess some of this is up to the speed control, etc algorithms.) Our current driver is starting to lean back towards joysticks, but it does understandably seem to vary based on how much of a gamer one is. A steering wheel though, that's an idea. Wonder if our driver's ever doing to get her license.