paper: FRC #33 The Killer Bees 2013 Software - BuzzXVIII (Buzz18)

[JamesTerm]

Originally Posted by magnets

That's pretty cool. I like the idea of automatically switching to quick turn after the driver pushes the stick far enough to the side. This is similar to a team who used an actual steering wheel to control their robot one year!

Also, do you know if anybody has come up with a way to use these style algorithms on swerve/meccanum, or with the sort of drive that 148 used in 2010 (I forget what it's called).

I am not sure if this was for Palardy or me... but since it has the word "automatically" I'll assume it was in response to the demo. With that said... it doesn't really switch to quick turn but rather the x axis controls the angular velocity of the robot. Mechanical engineers (except for Jim Zondag) think I'm crazy for wanting to control velocity, but I got the idea from Ether way back when we were talking about swerve drives here. This thread listing has equations that work for swerve drive, but also with some modification can work (and do for us) for tank, and slide drive (or nona drive if it has the extra set of wheels). Also included in here is a link to a demo of the swerve drive simulation. If you go down this path for skid steering drives like tank... be sure to factor skid into the equations to be correct (if you neglect this it will still work fine, but if you want to tune angular rotation to encoders you'll need it then).

I should add that I have incorporated the culver drive into some simulated swerve and nona drive code and they work great because this is solving the x-axis method, and passes the value as if it was the x-axis.

Originally Posted by magnets

How do your drivers feel about this setup? In the past we've tried some similar things (cheesydrive/right stick steering wheel), but our drivers preferred a tank drive setup, claiming that the cheesy drive was better for driving around an empty field, but when in pushing matches and having to line up, tank drive was better.

I get a mix of feelings as the feel is subjective... some like to have full manual control of it (like driving a standard)... others like it to be intuitive. I like the idea of driving with encoders in a pushing match. There I said it! I know a lot of people disagree with that. But I get the physics behind what it means, and I'll stand by that idea... getting our team to use it is another story.