The Hardest Drive System To Program:

[davidthefat]

Originally Posted by basicxman

Any base drive system is not incredibly difficult to program. Programming an effective control system for a drive system is hard.

see:

• Failure checking (state machine, redundancies)
• Human error correction
• Mechanical error correction

I really don't know what to answer your question with, everytime I think of a drive system I think of all the ways I could improve it with pieces of code - would be very difficult to pick a single one, and would require more context.

Can you elaborate on your 3 points a bit more please?

[basicxman]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

Can you elaborate on your 3 points a bit more please?

> Failure checking (state machine, redundancies)
If a sensor relating to your drive system fails, what is going to happen to your robot? A lot of teams run a separate task on the cRio that monitors for failures and then triggers a state change when a failure occurs. For instance let's say a gyro stops reading values, rather than making the robot spin in circles, the drive system would ignore gyro values.

Redundancies being increased reliability of a drive system, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_(engineering)

> Human error correction
How much money would you put on the fact that your driver can hold two joysticks at 50% throttle precisely? Probably not a lot.

> Mechanical error correction
Motors aren't made equal. Two motors of the same model will rarely go at the same speed. Using encoders and other techniques to correct this.

[davidthefat]

Originally Posted by basicxman

> Failure checking (state machine, redundancies)
If a sensor relating to your drive system fails, what is going to happen to your robot? A lot of teams run a separate task on the cRio that monitors for failures and then triggers a state change when a failure occurs. For instance let's say a gyro stops reading values, rather than making the robot spin in circles, the drive system would ignore gyro values.

Redundancies being increased reliability of a drive system, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_(engineering)


> Human error correction
How much money would you put on the fact that your driver can hold two joysticks at 50% throttle precisely? Probably not a lot.

> Mechanical error correction
Motors aren't made equal. Two motors of the same model will rarely go at the same speed. Using encoders and other techniques to correct this.

"Safe Mode": If triggers, switches to bare bone drive code.
Multiple sensors to "check" each other

We just used dead zones for the human error part

We didn't use the encoders because there was too much noise that I did not trust them enough to use it.