Custom Driver Stations

[slibert]

Originally Posted by SeanFitz

As a driver, I've always used a simple control scheme with everything on one XBOX controller. I guess I just find it easier to use, and only me driving eliminates any communication problems that could come between having two drivers.

But I'm curious about teams that use other Driver Stations. How well do they work? Are there any communication problems between your drivers? How well do the custom driver stations with all the buttons work? Does anyone feel as though there is an advantage to a certain version versus another?

As a follow up, how to you guys control your robots? I.E. What controllers, arcade vs. tank vs. custom, stuff like that.

Over the summer, we built a custom panel enclosure powered by an Arduino Leonardo; this provided a great way for students new to programming to work with basic electronics and simple C-style programming; because the Leonardo can also pretty easily implement a USB HID interface, this allowed us to build what looked to the PC like a real joystick. It just plugged into the Driver Station and worked right away.

Part of the exercise during the summer was to design a custom Arduino Shield which had the interface to 16 buttons, 4 potentiometers and a LCD display for debugging. The students enjoyed the process of unpacking the package from the factory in China w/the custom shields w/our team name on it that did just what we wanted, and soldering the shift registers/resistors and other components on the board - and each student got one to work with.

For our driver, in addition to a standard off-the-shelf 3D USB joystick for our mecanum drive, we added 4 dedicated buttons arranged in a circle for the driver to perform an "auto-rotate" to 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees. To strafe in a straight line, the driver simply held down the "auto-rotate to 0 degrees" button while strafing. These buttons are the big arcade-style buttons they sell on Sparkfun for a few dollars each. That, in addition to our Field-centric drive system provided a lot of driving control.

Then for our "gizmo" operator, we dedicated 6 toggle switches for control of the pneumatic system. We initially thought of using push-buttons, but realized after some testing that a toggle switch was much more intuitive. The operator got good enough to manage multiple switches with a single hand.

[NOTE: we also learned that in autonomous mode the robot can receive the state of all the switches, we didn't know that before because we'd never tried toggle switches previously. That allowed us to do some creative modifications to the way the robot behaved in our autonomous programs.]

We also bought a big red LED-lit "FIRE" button from Sparkfun - but we didn't get a chance to use that this year.

Once the drivers realized they could move buttons and switches around wherever they wanted, it really encouraged some creativity and refinement that helped the driving team be very involved, efficient and reliable.

And a few very clever mentors figured out how to get the enclosure to fold up into a box shape w/the laptop nestled inside, so it was very easy to carry from the pits to the field.

Next year we want to add a rotary switch for the autonomous program selector, which should be more simple (and more reliable) than the "SendableChooser" in the Smart Dashboard they currently use to select their chosen autonomous program. Because there are some potentiometers to work with, we may put a camera pan/tilt servo control on the panel, or perhaps something that steers a turret, depending on the game.

Now we've built the groundwork and experience to be able to customize the panel for the different challenges we expect to face in the future.

[elfenari]

We usually do driving with 2 attack pros and mechanism control with an Xbox controller. This year we switched out the attack pros for a single extreme3d because we are using mecanum drives. On our Xbox controller, the two triggers are used for up/down motion, and the a button to toggle our clamp. I'm the coach, and the way the drivers work together is pretty funny to me. Our driver 1 uses our second driver like a voice control for the robot.

[TheModMaster8]

Personally I believe one driver is better then two, as i know what im going to do but the person next to me doesn't, but to answer your question our team used Xbox controllers for both human and driver, and yes there was communication problems, though our human player was outstanding

[MikLast]

We used mecanum for the first time this year, so instead of our usual joysticks we got a logitech Extreme 3D pro joystick for our driver, and then we have a regular joystick for our forklift driver, and he has his own setup with custom buttons for auto-align and such.

As for working together, they have been our drivers for three years, and they worked really well together, and there wasn't much issue with communicating to the human player, (me.) We use arcade drive with one controller, our drivers find it easier to use the robot that way. We also rarely use the station window itself, just to choose our auto routine.

[GeeTwo]

Whether we have one driver or two is entirely a function of robot complexity. Our competition robot for Recycle Rush only had three CIMS (two drive, one lift) and no other actuators, so a single driver did it all through an xBox controller. We had two drivers that originally swapped off about halfway through the match based on their strengths; later we switched to a "primary/relief pitcher" model. We also used a single xBox for Aerial Assist (mecanum + 3 actuators); I believe we had a primary and a backup driver. For Ultimate Ascent and Rebound Rumble, I seem to recall that we had two separate controllers, one for the "main game" and another for the "end game". I think we used PlayStation for one and classic atari-style joysticks for the other both of those years. The drivers had a bit of cross-training, but for the most part they specialized in one part or the other. We have not done any "custom drive stations" beyond having a custom wooden structure to support and secure the COTS driver station and controllers; this year all we did was add some velcro to the classmate and controller so they didn't fall off the shelf.