Driving: Tank, Arcade or FPS?

[JamesCH95]

As a (relatively) old-school driver I liked single-stick arcade control for FRC robots. This typically works best with a real gimbal'd joystick, where the driver can 'feel' center on the stick. Most common joysticks are not gimbal and thus lose a lot of the 'on-center' feeling that makes this control scheme beloved by many.

In recent years we've used game pads with single-stick arcade that I found easy to drive, and I liked it a lot. This takes some modest drive transforms to fine-tune to the driver's taste, but nothing complex. These transforms help address the 'on center' feeling and let the robot drive forward even if the thumb-stick is off-centered slightly.

I've got an RC car with 'dual stick' arcade that I like to drive and find very easy to control. The divorced axes for f/r and l/r are really nice and lets one send precisely the inputs they want.

I have raced a lot of Forza (car simulation game) which uses one thumb-stick for turning and two triggers for throttle/brake (forward/reverse on a robot) and like that too. The f/r and l/r axes are divorced, which is nice, and the forward/reverse axes are also divorced. For the extra-fine control required for a semi-realistic car sim it is great to be able to apply both the throttle and the brake, and I imagine it would work well for an FRC robot as well, but perhaps only marginally better than 'dual stick' arcade.

I absolutely cannot stand 'tank drive' where two joysticks are used. It forces the driver to do the drive 'math' in their head, something a computer is MUCH better suited to do. I never felt that it was intuitive, fluid, or an efficient use of controllers. I know some people/teams have been successful with it, but I can only imagine how much more successful they could have been with any of the controls described above.