drivers

[edomus]

More than one person driving at a time? We found this to be inefficeint and confusing.

[Daniel Brim]

Do you have anything on your control board? Our co-driver operates the control board, as our joysticks are on a seperate panel.

[Josh Hambright]

We have a driver who does the driving thing with just 2 joysticks that have the y axis controlling 1 side of the robot each.

Then i operate the arms and other dohickies on the robot from a seperate and much more complicated joystick and button box....

It would be alot harder to have one person trying to operate our arm and drive at the same time but michael (onizuka) and i have really good communication and can work really well together...
its all a matter of practice...

I have seen some teams that do it all with 1 person but with a bot with an arm or a complicated device other then the drive train i think it would be better with 2 people

[edomus]

Because we are a rookie team we decided to go really simple, and because of this everthing works great. We have 1 joystick for steering, and one for our lifting aparatis. all other functions are done by the buttons and triggers on there respective joysticks

[Rob Colatutto]

not a very good idea having one person do everything.... we set up our 2001 bot for one person control and all it had was an arm that goes up and down, and that was confusing when you actually tried driving. theres reason they let you have a second operator, i suggest you use one

[edomus]

we tried both ways but it in the end the robot worked much better when only I controlled it. My co-driver will deploy our secret weapon when need be but the actual operation of the robot for our design seems to work better with one person. I think this is because we did not have much time to practice and comunication was lacking.

[f22flyboy]

We have 2 joysticks that control the drive, with buttons that do various drive aiding functions. Also, one button controls the tilt of the forklift vertical. Then the co-driver controls the grabber arms and the lifting mechanism, along with some other goodies. This allows the driver to have complete mobility around the field (because I can lower the vertical to go under the bar), while the co-driver can focus entirely on bin grabbing and stacking. But communication is key.

[Ashley Weed]

There are two of us on our team, and for as far back as I know, we have always used two. The first driver (Bob) has a joystick, and has complete control of the base. Included this year is the buttons on the joystick for shifting from 2wd to 4wd, and an auxilary box with a switch to shift high to low gears. The second driver (me) has one joystick to control the arm. In addition I have a control box that has appx. 8 or so different buttons; one for each possible 'mode' we can be in.

I would suggest trying to implement a plan to include a second driver, and keep communication as your key.

[Mimi Brown]

2nd drivers are help out in more ways than one. It gives your team an extra set of eyes on the field, too. Or, they can help out as a 'secondary coach' type person as well.

[edomus]

that is the plan

[Rickertsen2]

we have 2 drivers. one has 2 joysticks for steering and footpedals for breaking (yes we have breaking but i can't give any more details than that). our codriver has another joystick that controls our lifter as well as our "wings"

[edomus]

footpedals? nifty!

[Dave_222]

2 drivers like always. One joystick and one control box (cant tell you what for) for the driver and one control box and one joystick for the endeffector. pretty baisic but it works well and like everyone else here has said communication is the key.

[evulish]

Foot pedals while standing? That seems awkward... Why not just make a button on your board?