Driver practice
The importance of driver practice
As most of you know, driver practice is one of the most important preparations you can do. Drivers get familiar with everything that involves a match, before, during and after. And most importantly driving a robot. This is especially significant for us, as we’ll have two new drivers this year.
What do we practice?
Before we started driver practice, we looked at what the most important skills are for a driver. We quickly came to the conclusion: ACCURACY! We analyzed our cycles from last season and noticed that our cycles mostly got delayed by aiming time (the red areas in the picture below). It is insane how much time we lost inside the community and loading zone. In our opinion the times of driving and aiming should be about the same, instead of this huge difference.
The second most important thing is strategic insight. If your driver has a good feeling for the controller, that’s good for them, but without playing strategically you won’t perform at your best. The driver needs to be able to play defense, play under defense, and most important of all: know the Game Manual rules! Without knowing every single rule you won’t play at your full potential.
How do we practice that?
To train the drivers accuracy, we designed some very tight tracks. What we train with this is to not fully press the joystick (and drive 100%), but to drive somewhere between 40%-70% of the speed to get a good feeling for the robot’s speed. The goal is to knock over as little pawns as possible, and by driving 70%+ speed that is nearly impossible. Within those tracks there are some “ checkpoints” where the robot must have a certain orientation. Those checkpoints train the drivers to not only focus on robot position, but also on robot orientation.
To train strategic insight, the drivers drive cycles instead of specific tracks. They get to apply their recently learned precision skills, and by adding obstacles they steadily gain real life match experience. One time a penalty zone can be added, the other time a defense bot will try to slow down their cycles, and sometimes both will be applied. Another exercise is playing tag. One robot tries to pin the other robot. After just under 5 seconds the pinned robot is tagged and now tries to pin the first robot again. From these exercises the drivers gain a better understanding of what it’s like to drive defensively and under defense.
Current progress
Our future drivers are doing great! They have shown so much progress during the weeks and are eager to learn and train all the time. We really saw the difference it made by first practicing precision tracks before trying cycles, as the drivers have a much better feeling for the robot’s speed than before. Of course, driver practice will continue during build season.
As you might have noticed there are no operator focussed exercises other than the 2023 cycles. This is because it is very hard to practice operator skills without knowing the game. It is a matter of knowing all the robot actions and performing them at the right time.
Future steps
After the build season we will evaluate everything; from exercises, to schedule, to the driver’s personal opinion and feedback. With this evaluation we hope to improve our driver practice, as well as look into the possibilities of creating a few operator exercises.
As we are very certain this is a solid way to train our drivers, we are very curious to hear what others do for driver practice. Total amount of hours, what exercises, etc. We are happy to learn!
Written by:
@Teis_Joepman - Lead Scouting & Gameplay