Good vs. Great Drive Teams

[theprgramerdude]

In my experience, unless the arena is at a moderate volume (read: never), the captain rarely can do anything to easily communicate with the two drivers unless they were wearing headsets with noise-cancelling headphones (idea?).

The two drivers on a good drive team work well together, and most importantly, work well under the pressure of only two minutes of performance. OK drivers can move the robot smoothly, but lose sight of the whole arena easily when focusing on getting good control and motion of the robot to it's destination. Good drivers should be able to do this and be capable of analyzing the game at the same time.

Great drive teams, in my opinion, are essentially made of three people: two are the good drivers. The third is the robot software. Humans are great analysts at controlling robots, and learn smooth movements extremely fast, but their reaction time and precision can easily be beat by the Crio commanding certain executions with input from sensors located on the robot. In this way, the two drivers are really the captains of the machine, and the Crio drives. Results may vary when in a transition from good to great. There's going to be a hard limit on what a person can do while driving; if you want a better machine driver, just throw on more technology and better code.