Drive Team Chemistry

[lark95]

Originally Posted by K-Dawg157

As the operator of our robot for the past two years, I find that chemistry is very key.

Instead of having us drive separately, he told us to pair up with someone we work best with, and then choose who would drive and who would operate. This helped us to make sure that we could communicate properly, and have good chemistry between us. Anyone who wanted to try got to choose 2 partners, to tryout 2 times. There was then a final team that worked well and still got the job done.

Trust is a huge part of drive team as well.

You hit the nail on the head with these. Primary/secondary Driver/operator, whatever you want to call them must work well together, and trust, trust is very important. if a driver cant listen to a coach and trust what he is saying, and a coach cant trust a driver to do what is right in a situation, a drive team will fall apart.

[jijiglobe]

The most important thing to remember is that, going on to the field, each member of drive team should know exactly what they are going to be doing every match. I don't mean that as in knowing the match strategy, though they should, I mean in terms of what types of calls they will be making and what things they are going to be saying. This will depend on your drive team dynamic but talk to your drive team and come up with a system. For instance, our coach stands behind us but on the side closer to where our human player is and makes strategic calls, relays instructions to the human player, and gives our driver/operator updates on what was happening elsewhere on the field. Our driver handles the doings of the robot. This means that he moves the robot around the field and tells the operator exactly what to do. If the driver says lift then the operator should lift 100% of the time. There need to be some ground rules. If your coach makes the strategic decisions, the rest of drive team should listen no matter what.

Remember: It doesn't matter if your drive coach makes the wrong call 50% of the time because disagreement among drive team is the wrong call 100% of the time