Drive Team Configuration

[Cyberphil]

Originally Posted by apalrd

Not good. Not Not Not Not Not good.

The more a driver drives, the more practice they get. Our current driver and operator (Matt and Kitty) have driven in aprox. 150 matches, 130 of them together. They still have one FRC season left before graduating. They are very very good at operating the machine, and know how to communicate with each other. If your drive team changes in every match, they will not have the experience of a drive team of another team who doesn't change every match, so even with a better machine, the other team will still win.

There is a universal trend that shows that teams get better as they play at more events. While they make changes to the robots, most of this is because of driver practice.

Have you ever been to an off-season with mentor matches? Teams tend to perform worse when the mentors drive. At the MARC, we had an alumni driver (and he drove for two years in FRC), and our coach (Jim) as our driver and operator. They lost early on. With our regular operator and coach (and a different driver, who had about 2 hours of practice time) we won the event.

Extremely well stated.

By far, the best thing your team can do to improve your robots performance is get the drivers as much practice as possible! Whether that means both of them working together, or if you only have one person driving all of the robot.

In Breakaway, our mentor decided that it would be a good idea to have one person drive every part of the robot at once, and have the operator be more like a spotter, telling the driver where the balls were if the driver could not see them.

We did not finish our robot early enough to have a lot of practice for the operator and I. We did not do extremely well at our first competition, and this is mainly because the drivers had extremely limited practice.

Our best performance was in Ramp Riot, the post season event, because I had plenty of time behind the controls and knew how the robot drove and worked extremely well.

So words of wisdom:
1. Find your drivers early and practice, practice, practice, PRACTICE!
2. Make sure they know the game and how FIRST works in general (We do not let new kids drive the robot no matter how good they are)
3. Practice more

Hope this helps!

[Koko Ed]

Our drives team consist of a driver an operator (who handles whatever scoring apparatus the robot uses) a human player and a coach (which has always been and most like always will be a student with us). We have a backup driver and a backup human player.

[GaryVoshol]

Beside being able to operate the controls, the drivers need to be able to work well together. If the driver goes "left" as the arm operator tries to pick up "right" - not a recipe for success.

If you should decide to switch people around, be sure everyone who is partcipating knows the rules. I don't know how may stupid penalties have been called because there's someone new out there that doesn't know what is going on and does something illegal - blatantly illegal, something that drivers and HP's who were around from Match 1 would know enough not to try.

[Siri]

Most years, we have a driver and operator. In "arm" games like 2007, these roles have similar control demands and require excellent coordination between the two. This changes from game to game for us though, for instance 2009 was less operator intensive. In 2010, we really didn't use our operator much during the season at all. (In retrospect, we should have given them another official job.) The extra functions were relatively easy for our driver to control, but part of it was just lack of driver-operator coordination. Once we found an operator that fit in well, it got easier.

I'll vouch for the practice-practice-practice stances, though. Having been a
mechanical and pit captain, captain-manager, operator and coach, drive team practice is the most efficient way to improve your performance. Don't change your drive team!

Also, Karthik says, 'the role of the field coach cannot be overstated'. If you don't know what you're doing, find out! Ask fellow coaches (especially if they're from 71, 1114, 148*, 217, 45, 33...) and ask your drive team. Read and practice.

*EDIT: yes, listen to that guy. ^