Who amongst you have forklift mechanisms on your bot ?
How do you have your joystick controls programmed/wired ?
A mentor drove a forklift before and the controls standard for a forklift is
for the joystick to be pulled back to raise the fork …
Page 37 in this standard:
I know that the controls should be what the operator wants for some teams. For us, we programmed it that way and retrained our operators. It made sense for some of them, and did not for some of them.
The standard may be setup like a fighter pilot since the load is in front of him and the joystick is big enough to require the entire hand while driving a real forklift. Pull back on the stick, start looking up - just like a fighter pilot.
For thumb-sticks, it doesn’t matter IMO. Pull back on the stick and you’re still looking straight out.
We have a bit of automation in ours, but ours isn’t a typical forklift either.
We’re using a sliding pot to set the position of the lift with a separate button that will bring it to the bottom when pressed, then return it to the set position when released. With PID on the lift motor this should allow us to take the height of the lift to any position we like and allow for a quick stacking motion.
The best controls are ones that make sense to your drive team. They’re the ones that have to be driving in the heat of competition. Every year our programmers develop driving code for a traditional joystick and an Xbox controller. For driver tryouts we allow each student to pick which they’d like to drive with. When the drive team is selected, the drive team (not the mentors, coaches, or other students) picks button and stick axis assignments.
Your drive team should be telling the programmers how the robot is controlled, not the other way around.
We have a forklift, though it has about 20 tines instead of two and they are vertical rather than horizontal.
I believe that our prototype control uses a horizontal joystick axis. Our final one will probably have a “manual” joystick control, but most of the lift and lower commands will be issued through buttons. We’re coding a number of pre-defined positions into the lift.
The bottom line is, find something that the drivers can work with as early as possible, and practice, practice, practice! Don’t tweak it unless it is requested by the drive team.
Remember, if you are automating like this, to always always always give your drivers a non-automated manual override. Because when that sensor feedback breaks and your automated PID isn’t functioning, you still want them to be able to control it.
EDIT: OOPS, wrong thread.