Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Streeter
What I understand you to be suggesting is to instead use the two joysticks so that one of the joysticks controls front/back of the whole robot (like front/back in "arcade style") and the other joystick controls right/left turning (like right/left in "arcade style") but using 2 joysticks to provide this input rather than just one input.
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This is how 254 and 968 have driven their robots for the last 2 years.
On 971, we do the same thing, except we use a steering wheel instead of a joystick for turning.
It's nice for the exact same reason that Jason described, you have decoupled the steering from the throttle. I don't know if this is common or not, but we decouple our steering from our throttle in software as well. Our steering wheel controls the radius of our turns, not the turn power. I've found that this makes it a lot more accurate. If you like how your current turn trajectory is going, and just want to go slower, all you have to do is let off the throttle, compared to letting off the throttle and the steering power. Fiddling with this kind of stuff is a great summer project. It's amazing how much more responsive good code can make a robot feel.
As a bonus, read up on IBM's Trackpoint mouse. There's a pretty cool feature that it has that helps with robot handling.
...and then at the end they interviewed this 5 year old on his favorite part (of the fair): "I liked the robot" - Jessica Boucher [more] 
03-05-2010, 19:46
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