Hey guys! 612 is starting up driver practice for Battle o’ Baltimore this week, and we are going to have a new driver and gunner pair (old driver is now drive coach, old gunner retired to do more mechanical stuff).
What kinds of exercises do you guys do to train your drivers? We have access to our 2024 robot Sonic, along with another barebones-driving chassis. We also still have our speaker from last year.
Drive coach here. Need to know some specifics.
Where can you score? Amp, speaker, trap, all of the above? Climbing? Swerve or tank?
For anyone new to swerve like we were, what helped our drivers was doing some “maneuverability” tests. If you have cones from last season, even better. Figure-8s, squares, moving around “dead robots,” practice spinning or “deflecting” defending robots while moving across the field (pretty much move in a straight line in a given direction on the field while spinning and staying in control.) Our drivers got creative with it and made “lanes” with the cones you had to stay in while spinning. Also works well if you can have someone else controlling a “defender,” we used last year’s tank robot to practice going against defenders. Your barebones chassis would work great for this, and you get to train two drivers at once if you have the students!
Repeat everything. If your drivers have great muscle memory, they should be able to drive the robot in their sleep basically. Run from feeder to amp, feeder to speaker, run full timed matches to practice climbs, trap, etc. See how close you can cut your climbs if you HAD to, time your cycles, see how you can cut time to make your cycles faster. We repeat runs so frequently that we run the robot until the battery needs swapped.
Pick a “lane” or two. If you watch the cycles of one robot from a good driver on Blue Alliance, you might notice they take the same route, or the same two routes, depending on what is happening on the field. (Going to speaker, under your alliance stage, to other alliance’s stage, to feeder, avoiding stages coming back, line up at speaker and shoot, repeat.) Its part of that muscle memory I mentioned above.
I encourage the drivers as a coach to watch good teams on Blue Alliance, or some “behind the glass” videos from FUN. I particularly liked seeing how 254 communicated on the field last year when placing cones and cubes. Pick a typically high-ranking team from your region on there and watch some of their matches. Watch some more popular teams like 254 or 1118, see what makes them and their strategies stand out from other drive teams. “Take from the best and invent the rest” doesn’t just apply to robot building.
Thanks! This is a lot of good stuff! I’ll be passing this on.
We can use our other bot as defense for sure. We don’t have an amp or a stage to test climb, but we can have them do repeated cycles with the speaker for sure. I love the idea of the lanes and spinning, that will be very good especially for them to get used to FOD and swerve (both bots are swerve).
One of our biggest problems, though, is our carpet space. We only have 2 carpets, and we have to set up/take them down and store them every meeting, so we never have a big field. We’ll have to smallerize these drills you’ve suggested.
Another thought - can we drive the robot on the road? We have a road right outside our room that we can use (school road, not busy), if swerve won’t get too damaged because of it.
I think this would damage your wheels and potentially throw unwanted asphalt, stones, etc. up into your gearboxes if you don’t have adequate covers to keep debris out. If you could swing the cost of replacing the wheels, this could be a decent alternative. Maybe bring the carpets outside to practice? I have seen some teams do this.
ooo, that’s not a bad idea. I’ll bring that up. Thank you so much!
If your base driver needs practice on control, I always bring out some of the 2021 game challenges.
It would also probably be worth looking into what team near you has a bigger driving practice space they would let you use. I know for us we sometimes visit CORI in Columbus, OH for scrimmages and such. 
Having enough space for drive practice is a challenge.
2021 game challenges? I wasn’t there that year, could you elaborate?
