Driving and "Traction controls"

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by nathanww

I would be extremely cautious about doing this, because

1. Functionality of the robot != responsiveness to commands. The cRio is capable of making tactical descisions in the time it takes a human driver to blink. With something that requires as much prescision as traction control, the robot needs to be able to override the human operator, not vice-versa
2. Similar to this, making an effective descision to disable a TC system requires understanding at a low level of what is going wrong with the system. If you think that you can do that with the robot 50ft away from you, on a competition floor, while driving, in about 10 seconds, that's great, but otherwise it's likely that mucking about with the robot's programmatic internals on the field will do more harm than good(our original plan was to have a system to essentially fix common problems that might come up with the robot from our OI, but we scrapped this after we discovered that our drivers thought process was something like "robot acting odd->mash buttons"

That's only true if the robot is A) programmed correctly, and B) the programming is actually advantageous to your strategy.
Beyond that, it may just be a difference in design philosophy, but I always want my driver to have the ability to override my robot. There's no way to predict every potential situation on the field, and as such, there's now way to program every potential reaction into your robot. Sometimes a human (preferably very well trained) is needed to react in the proper way.