pic: FRC971 Spartan Robotics Presents: Renegade

[Siri]

Awesome shooting! How do you like the steering wheel for driving control? And is it just the wheel or are the other buttons/pedals/something involved?

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Siri

Awesome shooting! How do you like the steering wheel for driving control? And is it just the wheel or are the other buttons/pedals/something involved?

Given this team's history (and programming mentors), I am guessing that this is their driving arrangement ("Cheesy Drive"):

1. A wheel (you can also use the X axis of a joystick) for turning
2. A throttle
3. A quick turn button

When you are not holding down the quick turn button, the wheel and throttle let you control the bot like a car (in other words, constant radius turns independent of your throttle power, which is hard to do with arcade or tank setups).

When you hold down quick turn, you can turn in place (the wheel becomes like a standard X axis in an arcade drive).

But again, just a guess

Originally Posted by Siri

Awesome shooting! How do you like the steering wheel for driving control? And is it just the wheel or are the other buttons/pedals/something involved?

Same question. To add on, do you feel there are any advantages to using the steering wheel controller? (User intuitiveness, just feels easier/right to use, etc?)

[Nuttyman54]

Austin can give a more accurate answer than I, but I believe we are running a version of "Cheesy Drive"

At high speeds, your rate of turn is very sensitive to small disturbances in drive side speeds, so holding a good line with tank sticks gets increasingly difficult as your drive speed goes up. By letting the computer take care of the exact speeds and feeding the system a turning radius and speed, high speed control becomes much easier. It also allows you to scale the steering response based on your throttle level, although I don't know if we do that or not.

The quick-turn button allows a more traditional steering scheme for in-place turns. We've been using a steering wheel setup since 2006 and it's served us really well. It's just the wheel and a joystick for throttle control, as Jared surmised.

Thanks. Just for reference, do you know which steering wheel controller you use?

[kevincrispie]

Originally Posted by SuperNerd256

Thanks. Just for reference, do you know which steering wheel controller you use?

I believe the one we are using at the moment is a Ferrari Thrustmaster wheel. We've used a few different ones in the past, but they weren't as robust. The wheel needs to be auto-centering one way or another, whether that be by design or stringing surgical tubing inside the wheel. However, its much better to have it bought as auto-centering. It less work to convert over.