What do you think is better for standard wheel/tank drive controls?
1 joy stick or 2 joysticks?
comments on which is easier to program and which is easier to control would be appreciated.
I voted 1, but only because we are using a xbox controller, so the two sticks have separate axis, making tank drive easy to control.
Tank drive takes two controls, one for the left side and one for the right. How would you imagine doing that with a single joystick?
One could program a tank style robot with “Arcade” sytle driving with a single stick, but I strongly recommend against this.
Last year was the first year a team I have worked with tried to use a gamepad vs. the two joystick style. We used this specific controller, similar to what has been used in FTC: Logitech F310
It has a lot of nice features (such as analog triggers, which we use for our “Falcon Claw” feature) and has less dead band then an xbox controller. We highly recommend this controller, kids these days seem to handle a PS3 controller rather well, go figure
Two, always two…
One could program a tank style robot with “Arcade” sytle driving with a single stick, but I strongly recommend against this.
Why is this a bad idea? My team has done this for the past several years, and we’ve never seemed to have a problem with it. Is it easier to control the robot with two sticks?
Ultimately this comes down to driver preference. I’ve seen very good drivers who have used single stick, and very good drivers who have used two sticks.
While I won’t comment on which is easier to program, my recommendation is two stick drive because for many people it allows a greater precision and control. There isn’t anything a two stick drive can do that a single stick can’t (in arcade mode) - but for many, having a two stick control scheme that seperates left drive from right drive is more intuitive. It’s like you’re grabbing the right and left side of the robot and moving them yourself. With a single stick, it requires a slightly more abstract joystick motion to acheive the same effect.
Single stick leaves you with a free hand which can be used for other simple fuctions (e.g. shifting or shooting or… etc.). Two stick is not as convient in this regard, depending on how you hold the joysticks, but IMO, the loss here isn’t enough to recommend single stick.
I’ve always felt that tank drive (2 joysticks) gives you much more control than arcade drive (1 joystick). It seems like there are some things you can do with tank that you can’t with arcade. I’m sure some would disagree though. It depends a lot on your drive configuration as well.
We use the Logitech USB Gamepad, which counts as one controller, but liek said before, uses two separate sticks on the controller to control the left and right sides of the robot, respectively. I say “one” because of the fact that we’ve tried using two other separate controllers for the left and right control, we’ve found a preference for all of the needed controls to be on one controller.
Very true. You have a lot more control freedom with tank drive vs. arcade drive.