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Unread 24-12-2010, 14:06
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EricH EricH is offline
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FRC #1197 (Torbots)
Team Role: Engineer
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Rookie Year: 2003
Location: SoCal
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Re: Drive Team Configuration

Second the not good on switching every round.

Places you can get away with it: practice field, practice matches.
Places you could if (and that's a big if) you had 2-3 very good teams: Friday qual matches.
Places you can't: Saturday qual matches.
Places you really can't: Eliminations, if you're in them.

I think back to my time on 330. We really only had a couple of drive teams, and one coach. There were backups, but the primary drive team got most of the practice time. When we had a good, solid drive team, the human player switched every year, but the drivers never did. Between 2005 and 2008, we had one event where we did not make eliminations. One. The 2006 Championship. We had one drive team.

Regarding only having one person control the robot: It depends on the robot. But for most robots, the driver would need 3 hands with extra fingers on each hand to do it right. There are exceptions to this, like the Brave Little Toasters that drive around, get in the way, and otherwise make themselves annoying to the offense robots, but as a general thing there are too many motions to control. The only thing worse than having only one person control the robot is to have two people who don't work together very well. The trick is to find a pair of drivers who work well together such that they are almost extensions of each other when it comes to driving the robot.

The reason video games never have two people controlling the same character is because everyone wants to do everything. FIRST robots always have between 2 and 3. One is the programmer, another is the driver, and the third is the operator.

A better parallel might be a military or commercial aircraft. The only planes in those categories to have one pilot are some fighters. Most planes (including alternate models of most of those fighters) have a flight crew of at least 2 plus an autopilot. One is the pilot, one does stuff other than actually fly the plane, like dial in a target to the weapons system or check the weather ahead. That's what you need to be thinking like for the drive team.
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Past teams:
2003-2007: FRC0330 BeachBots
2008: FRC1135 Shmoebotics
2012: FRC4046 Schroedinger's Dragons

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