Hey! As a recently appointed drive coach, I want to select the drive team before the season begins. However, I’m not sure how to approach practice and training. Is it driving around cones and timing it? How do you guys do it?
Btw. we run a swerve drivetrain
Thx!
Do you have a practice field, or access to one? The best way to do drive practice is just full field cycling. If you dont have that the next best would be a half field. Would be enough to practice lining up shots in the scoring elements. If you don’t have access to either of those then having drivers drive though cones is a good practice. That’s how I learned to drive in FTC before we had a field. If possible having just scoring elements would help with being able to line up shots accurately.
Wouldn’t it depend on the game and what you are trying to work on? Practicing full-field cycling when you struggle with amp or are mostly doing cleanup cycles for your strategy sounds like an inefficient use of time. Deliberate practice is usually the way to develop skills.
I’d recommend watching
I’m not any sort of driver, but I know about and have used xrc at home which is a simulator of FRC games. You just need to hook up any kind of controller to your computer or laptop, download and run xrc, set the controls to whatever you like and play. Our teams current driver also used mosim (got WR) but I have no experience with that so I can’t say anything about that lol. If you want your drivers to practice outside of the time you already have, I’d suggest it : )
Edit: mosim instructions are on chief Delphi
I didn’t get to try it, but from what I’ve heard from people who have tried both, playing the simulator doesn’t help driving, and can even let the driver get used to something bad.
I may be wrong, because in the end it is an experience that is not mine, but I guess whoever told me this knows what he said.
I’d say it’s worth a shot, but totally agree if you wouldn’t want to do it based off of secondhand experience. If I was drive coach I’d let drive team know about it, have them figure it out for themselves and then let them decide if they like it or not.
Like you, I’m also doing the training for the first time, but I can testify that I learned a lot from the 1678 lecture, which someone recommended here before.
Most of our training is focused on driving and adapting to swerve and rotation while moving.
I recommend the classic exercise of turning around the cone with the face of the robot always towards the cone. 1678 recommended it and I also heard from our previous driver that it is an excellent exercise.
As soon as there is access to a full court, or even half a court (we stay with other teams when a full court is needed, but each team and its ability), it is possible to practice complete games and cycles.
This is about my personal learning, in the 1678 lecture you will hear about it in great detail, highly recommend it!
I suggest if you want to try a simulator use Mosim, from my personal experiences it’s way more realistic than XRC. And once the 2025 game is revealed instead of just running practice match’s run drills. Some examples of drills from the 2024 game would be:feeding from various positions on the field, playing cleanup, and full field cycling. Make sure your driver knows how to ease in and out of each role. It’s also helpful to teach the importance of field awareness which is something that XRC and Mosim can help with. Your driver should also know how to play and get around defense practicing both. Being a driver isn’t just about touching the controls it’s also about knowing what it takes to be a good driver, I find that people who understand strategy and enjoy watching match’s normally make good drivers because they will study how other teams which will help their own performance.
Adding onto this as a person who got to watch our bot routinely lock down opponents during competition – make sure your drivers practice counterdefense against other bots, because most don’t and it shows.
Like many open-ended problems in FRC, the solution is:
a) check to see if Citrus has anything published on it
b) apply Citrus wisdom to specific use-case.
Once again, it baffles me that they aren’t yet HOF.
Given the speeds and momentum available from swerve drivetrains, I strongly recommend that you give serious consideration to safety in setting up driver practice. Some kind of sturdy barrier to keep robots out of the people space and vice versa is a good idea, particularly when doing full-speed maneuvering.
xrc can build some pretty bad habits for drivers, that being said the VR version can help with some depth perception/intaking stuff