User Interface - Drivetrain Controls

[Jon Stratis]

This seems to be a question everyone has, regardless of what your drive train looks like. Even a basic drive train can be controlled multiple ways - 1 joystick with acceleration and twist on it, two joysticks with acceleration for each side, two with acceleration on one and twist on another... you get the idea.

When you get to thinking about more omni-directional drive systems, people tend to go with a Halo-like system, since a huge number of people are familiar with that. But even in Halo, there are multiple control systems - just look in the settings. You can change which axis on your two joysticks controls strafing and which controls turning, you can invert your controls, you can adjust the sensitivity... And all of those options are used by people somewhere.

We've found that the best way to present this to the drive team is to give them choice, just like Halo gives people choice. We've traditionally had the programming team implement several of the above options and let the drivers try each one out. They're usually able to tell us pretty quickly what they like and don't like. While the driver interface is controlled during testing with a switch on the OI, we usually end up disabling that switch before competition to prevent the controls from being accidentally changed.

Of course, you're going beyond what we've done in the past. Essentially, your drive system is set up so you can mimic a multitude of other systems. For use in demonstrations, this is great. But to speak honestly... for use in competition it may just have too many options. I've seen teams with similar drive modules limit the degrees of freedom in the past, and use that very effectively - use it essentially as a tank drive, with a switch to rotate the wheels 90 degrees when needed, for example. Having all the control in the world does you no good if your driver can't use it all intuitively.