One or Two Drivers??

[Ryan_Todd]

To the best of my knowledge, Lightning Robotics has never fielded a single-driver robot in our 15 years of existence:

FIRST is about the Inspiration, after all, and limiting the drive team to a single student-- especially if your reason is to avoid the valuable learning experience of working closely with your peers in a high-pressure environment-- strikes me as a rather uninspiring policy to have.

...With that said, we usually divide the labor as follows:

"Driver"

• All drivetrain, all day!
• Closely related subsystems (like ramps/wedges, whose entire purpose is to help the robot to navigate the field obstacles) are sometimes bundled in as well.
• Interface is always composed of full-sized joysticks (one or two, depending on the style of drivetrain).
  • I don't care how much of a hardcore gamer you may be; a thumb stick on a hand-held game pad will never offer the kind of fine-grained control that you want for an FRC drivetrain, period.
    • [EDIT] lol, I knew that I'd get splashback for this assertion!
    • I acknowledge that many students, having grown up with access to game consoles for their entire lives, can indeed reach great heights in terms of skill with a gamepad. With practice, a good driver can learn to compensate for the robot's inertia, resulting in a very competitive performance.
    • Regardless, I stand behind my original statement. The difference in scale between a robot and a joystick is significant enough as-is, but at least a joystick still gives you some sense of the robot's inertia. There's a good reason why gamepad thumbstick extenders are a thing: range of movement is kind of a big deal, and thumbsticks have very little of that. [/EDIT]
• Above all else, we depend on the driver for consistency; on top of the usual selection requirements of driving skill and cooperative attitude, the ideal driver is completely impervious to pressure and distraction when they are "in the zone" during a competition match.

"Co-pilot"

• Controls everything else: arm, intake, shooter, what-have-you.
• Back in the days of serial ports, the co-pilot's interface usedto be custom-made: an array of knobs and buttons chosen specifically for that year's subsystems.
  • These days, we usually just give the co-pilot a handheld game pad and a printout of the button mappings.
• The co-pilot is expected to multi-task like a champion, managing several subsystems simultaneously; they must also exhibit exceptional adaptability, in order to cope with mechanism failures and [s]improvements[/s] changes made by the programming team in between matches.

"Drive Coach"

• Pretty much self-explanatory...
• Studies the large-scale goings-on around the field, coordinates with alliance partners, and issues high-level commands to the drive team. Examples...
  • If the clock is running out: "One more shot, make it count!"
  • If we're defending against a powerhouse, and a ref starts counting down for a pin: "Countdown: 3... 2... 1... back!"
  • If we're crossing a defense, boulder in tow: "Batter shot, left side!"
  • If an ally gets stuck on a boulder: "Hey [####]! You need help?"
    (And if the answer is yes) "Ok! After this shot, we go help [####]."
• Selection criteria: preferably an alumnus with competition driving experience. Alternatively, someone with experience coaching or refereeing any sport will also do nicely.