Drive Team Configuration

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

It's your duty in FRC to your teammates and alliance partners to put the most competitive robot possible on the field.

Originally Posted by theprgramerdude

Wrong sir. Very wrong. There is absolutely no duty whatsoever to field the best competitive robot a team can, absolutely not. It is your opinion that putting out a good tele-operated robot would be better than an autonomous one to work with, but that is just YOUR OPINION. The fact that others may share you opinion does not mean that it is going to be a fact, as it's still YOUR OPINION.

Going back to the FIRST acronym, For INSPIRATION and Recognition of SCIENCE and Technology, a working, functioning autonomous robot is hands-down the best way, IMO, to get people to be inspired by the competition.

Pay close attention to the other two letters you ignored there. We're not just talking FIRST. We're talking the FIRST Robotics Competition. If you are going for "impressive" at the expense of "competitive", it's my opinion that you're being unreasonably selfish.

That's even before considering the increasingly obvious fact that the programmer in question (and his entire team, for that matter) has more than a few other things to work on before getting to the point where a fully autonomous robot is anything more than a fantasy.

[thefro526]

816 has always followed the following configuration for as long as I've been involved and from what I've heard since our inception.

Driver - Responsible for the movement of the robot and getting the robot to where it needs to be. Usually we've tried to keep the driver's controls to a minimum so there is less to worry about, but we have played on giving the driver some control over other machine functions (Ramps in 2007, Dumper override in 2009 which was never used.)

Operator - Responsible for robot manipulators. Pretty straight forward, anything that's not in the drive-train is usually controlled my the operator.

Human Player - Varies with the game, and usually is the person most likely to change from year to year depending on the role. Usually this person is relatively athletic should the game call for it, otherwise this role is assigned to one of the more dedicated members that wasn't able to cut it as Operator or Driver.

Coach - This is the role I've somehow fallen into since my graduation from HS, and I take responsibility for pre-match strategy, Analyzing Scouting Info (This varies from year to year, depending on what human resources are available) and watching the match while it is in progress. I try to keep my driveteam as well informed as possible both before and during the match so that they have less to worry about.

We also have a sort of an Assistant Coach on 816, Zach. He was our Coach in 2009 and a really close friend of mine so he usually travels with the team to help with strategy, scouting, keeping me sane, match analysis, comic relief and a handful of other things. If you don't have a Zach on your team, I think you should find one.

I place a large emphasis on drive team cohesiveness (I guess that's the appropriate term) and how well the personalities mesh with each other. I've worked with a lot of different drive team configurations in my 5-seasons with FIRST and I've found that this is often over looked. In many years we'd often pick the person that was best for a single job but often conflicting personalities would hinder the drive team from reaching it's full potential. Just something to think about.

We also like to keep at least one or two back ups for each position, but we never cycle through drive teams. (anymore) Consistency is often one of the most important things when Alliance Selections come around, so you should keep this in mind. Nothing's worse that picking a team and having them switch drivers or coaches during a match - it really messes up the flow of things.

Originally Posted by Chris is me

It's your duty in FRC to your teammates and alliance partners to put the most competitive robot possible on the field.

And statements like this are why I love you, Chris.

I really might have to borrow this one.

[sithmonkey13]

In 2010 for 1178 we had:
Driver: Drove the robot, could activate the kicker, or hold down a button to deactivate it

Weapons Operator: (Team Name, makes it sound really cool) Could kick, deactivate kicker, change kick setting and activate the winch on the robot.

Coach: Talked strategy with the other teams before the match, keep track of the score and penalties, help the human players communicate (if the person on the trident wasn't paying attention) and sometimes would tell us what our alliance partners would do

Human player: Pulled the balls out of the corral and handed them to the person with the trident

We kept the same four people for the whole St. Louis Regional, and aside from robot problems, it worked fairly well. I cannot tell you about 2009 but in 2008 the driver was given more control of other functions as the Weapons Operator had a complex task.