1 stick drive to 2 stick drive

[Mark Hamilton]

In my opinion, two stick is the way to go. The closer your controls model the way your robot works, the better. For example, a car uses a wheel and pedal to control it. This is is because a car operates by rotating the wheels, and spinning the wheels at a variable rate. If you robot drives by turning both sides independtly in a tank style drive, why not give your driver a contro system that mimics how the robot will actually react? It might take a little more getting used to, but in the end it is less confusing. No matter what orientation the robot is facing, if the driver is thinking like the robot, he will not get confused. He can think of driving on the robots terms. With a 1 stick drive, he has to interpret the actions he needs the robot to perform into the right joystick movement. As for going straight, with some practice it should not be a problem. If it is, some simple code can fix it, just compare the joystick inputs, and if they are very similiar, interpret them as being equal, giving you a straight line. My message to the programmers on my team when I was driving was always the driver knows best(when it comes to actually controlling the robot). Write code to assist the driver, not try to replace him, or assume he really "meant" to do something else.