Our team is competing in our first practice competition on the 17th. In the past picking drive team members have been somewhat of a contentious issue.
How do you guys pick your drivers? Ideally I would like to establish some way of democratically selecting members. Also, it is unlikely are robot will be ready to practice with before the competition.
We put our drivers though a series of test. We then pick a team not only base on skill put who works together the best
What type of tests do you give your drivers?
Usually our programmer(s) drive or are head driver but to make it fair we hold alittle drive test. Our coaches time and judge the driving abilites of anyone who wants to drive but first they all have to pass a rules test. As the rules are the heart of the game we choose a few and create hypothetical situations to see if they (short) answer correctly. The programer will program to their liking wheather others can drive well or not but that is the nature of the job. Ask how they set it up and practice on the bot before ship or a team run competition.
Depth of Perception test, Weaving in and out of cones forwards and backwards, Reaction test, Game scenarios
Picking a drive team can be a tough proposition. This year we had 12 students go for it. We put our students through a written exam, a panel interview and a practical test (which includes driving a past year’s robot, accomplishing tasks and dealing with different issues that may arise).
Once all of that is done, we go through all of the data compiled from the three assessments, and then we pick our driver, manipulator and human player. We also pick an alternate, just incase something happens. I will post my test to CD later this evening, so if you would like, you can check that out.
In terms of who to pick. We try to emphasize that the drive team inadvertently becomes the public ambassadors of the team at events. They, more than most other students on the team, interact with other teams, developing strategies and building relationships. They also interact with judges, referees and other VIPs more due to their proximity to the field. It is a big role. The students need to be responsible, diplomatic and have a thorough understanding of how the game and tournament work.
Good luck!
2607, for the past few years, has not had to pick drivers. We are a fairly small team, and we just let whoever wants to drive drive the robot. I, as our head programmer, write the code specifically for our primary driver and primary copilot, and the others either adapt or have me add a driver toggle (which I don’t recommend, we almost destroyed our Logo Motion arm because one of the copilots didn’t know there was a switch that inverted the controls.) (We had one dedicated pilot, and two pilot/copilots, and they made up the entirety of people who wanted to control the robot.)
The only thing we pick is the driver we base any human error prevention code off of. One of our drivers rammed something during Logo Motion, and our minibot tray came off.
Then, in Rebound Rumble, he tried to get a ball under the opposing alliances bridge, and earned us our only technical foul all season.
Since these events happened, we always joke about how we need to use the code to stop him from doing something with the robot.
However, yesterday, he was replaced by someone who drove our t-shirt robot off of the stage during a school show. (No one was hurt even a little bit, and the robot should be fine too.)
It’s actually nice that this topic came up. I was going to start a thread about a similar enough topic, that it would be wasteful to start a new thread.
I’ve attached our teams FDQT (FIRST Driver Qualification Test).
Every year, I write the new driver test, and this year I would like to share it with the CD community. I would also like to ask if others write tests like these. I also invite everyone to take the test! No notes or manuals open during the test, though! If you want the answer guide, just PM me. I may just post it on CD, once the build season is over.
I have been giving this a lot of thought, and Would like to submit to the CD community that there should be a community generated, standardized, FIRST exam generated every year. It would be nice to have collaborators, and the exam can be as extensive as we want it to be. But a resource like this could help rookie and veteran teams alike in the testing of their students, ensuring a proper understanding of the game rules and FIRST trivia in general. Any thoughts!?
ultimate_ascent_drivertest_2013.pdf (40.3 KB)
ultimate_ascent_drivertest_2013.pdf (40.3 KB)
Our recent records as of late is an indication that, using VEX as a training ground and recruitment/demonstration can be highly effective.
In 2010, we had 2 upper classmen ready to take over the driveteam duties. One of them was replaced by a freshman driver after we saw what he did during VEX in the Fall. He joined FRC during build season that year.
Unfortunately for our team, he and his family moved to Santa Barbara during this past summer. He was supposed to still drive as a senior.
We have 2 underclassmen now who we are confident as being just as skilled.
This year, we started with a rules test to weed out people who weren’t serious and ended up with five good competitors. None of them had any experience so two of our former drivers came back and trained them in the necessary skills. Then we held two tests:
A time trial of a ‘minefield’ of chairs. They had to go around it forwards, backwards, in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions. Points were deducted for the number of chairs they hit. Also, our driver from last year (now graduated) watched to see if they got confused directionally by the ‘front’ of the robot being different in different directions.
After that, we held an official test which one of our team members had the amazing idea to have during our open house to best stress the potential drivers and simulate competition conditions. We cordoned off a quarter of the cafeteria and created a mock field, scattered with chairs. On one side were five taped out rectangles in different orientations and on the other was a mock feeder station. In the middle was a ‘pyramid’.
In the middle of the open house, with about 50 random people looking at various displays in the cafeteria, someone yelled that the driver test would be taking place and everyone was welcome to watch. Of course everyone came in. Simultaneously, someone ran to tell the driver who would be tested that “they were late, everyone was waiting for them” (of course they weren’t actually late, we just wanted to make them feel rushed). Once they got there, they were hastily told to make trips across the field, going to the ‘feeder station’ and then aligning in the rectangles which were called out by two people simulating a coach and second driver, sometimes conflicting. Once they were satisfied with that phase, we dropped Logomotion tubes onto the field and had them push them into the aligning boxes. This was timed and scored based on how many times these tasks were accomplished in 3:30. For the last 30 seconds of the test, we drove out an old robot (for the previous time it and its driver was obscured from their vision). Their task became to delay it from getting to the ‘pyramid’ but not touching the pyramid.
To tell the truth, the actual scores on the test were less important than watching the drivers actually drive and handle stress.
Me and my partner driver have been the drivers since 2011. We picked because we both worked great together, and we are better at driving then anybody else on our team. Proof: we weren’t there at GTR West in 2011 on practice day, the other drivers hung one tube in 3 matches. when we got there after our exam we hung 6 tubes per match for 3 straight matches. Practiceing with 610 was also pretty fun 
Pick two people who know how to work together. Don’t slap to randoms together. they need to understand how everything works on the robot, and the strengths and weaknesses of it also. Use the robot to its best ability, not for a purpose it was not built to do. better drivers will make a crappy robot look good. and crappy drivers wil make a good robot look crappy.
My team had an established driving team, but the new leader wanted to see if they were really the best fit, so he set up a driving test using aspects of last years game and teamwork. Many tried out and were given a score. The drive team that I was part of scored highest, but the established team was given the starting position. I am not jealous, in fact, i agree with the decision. It is crucial to keep experience and keeping collected under pressure as high points that can’t be measured in a test.
jnelly i am truly grateful that you would post this. As the driver who was selected over you i can honestly say that if i was to lose my driving position to anyone i would want to lose it to you. Thanks for being so gracious. I believe that you deserve the gracious professionalism award.
I think there are 4 main criteria that need to go into selecting a winning drive team.
Ability to drive/perform the drive team position and responsibilities.
The ability to work with others on the drive team; this is especially important between the main driver and the co-driver, also the coach should have the ability to instruct the drivers and cooperate with other teams well.
Knowledge of the robot and the drive system, if a robot has problems before a match with the hardware or software they should be able to fix it.
The amount of participation they have put into build season. I feel this is especially important because being on the drive team is sort of an honor and it should be bestowed upon those who deserve it (not to mention that if they worked a lot on the robot they are more likely to fit into criteria #3 in most cases).
This is how our team chooses it’s drive team.
Grace under pressure. Team 27 must have so many choices!
Practice is probably the most important thing, switching drivers is really, REALLY, shooting yourself in the foot.
I started reading, and I know everything except what is “Ranking Score”?
Our drivers are usually the students who know the robot the best, typically those who spent the most time building it and learning how it works. We usually have a scout or a programmer to go up with them as coach.
First we have them take a written test then do an on field drivers test with either our practice bot or the previous year’s bot and finally they have an interview with the coach and the team’s leadership.
Once our team started taking part in VEX competitions it became a lot easier to pick our FRC driver(s).
And try to make sure you have a backup driver who gets some practice time in. Long story, but for our team’s very first “elimination match” we had to go with our backup driver because our primary driver was out looking for cheap shoes at the Nike outlet store. (In retrospect, it was more complex than described here and kind of understandable… but I didn’t really feel that way at the time!)
Also make sure the drive team includes at least one person who knows the mechanical/pneumatic/electrical system and one who knows the code/sensors/communication system.
If something goes wrong during the match… you lose comms, or bust a chain… you’ll need a detailed report from someone who knows the system and knows what to look for in order to expedite troubleshooting.
And they ALL have to know the rules… inside and out… before you let them anywhere near the competition floor.
Usually I would keep one or two positions (often the coach or human player) as a position where I could recognize graduating team members, or team members who had made extraordinary contributions by giving them some time on the playing field and a chance to receive the applause they were rightfully owed. It could be argued that we might have fielded a slightly better drive team for that match if I had put someone else “in”, but I think there was a long term payoff in having team members know that they could earn their way onto the playing field (if only for a match or two) through hard work and dedication.
Jason
So, you may have noticed that there are several questions in the test that are misleading…This is done primarily to test the confidence of the test taker. I basically want to know that they know the answer, and that they are confident that they know the answer. If I spoon feed answers and throw softball questions, I’m never going to find out what I want to know.
That being said, the answer I was looking for, in relationship to the “ranking score” is the following:
There is no “ranking score” in the sense that ranking is not scored the same way as a Match score or a qualification score. A teams ranking is determined by the calculated sum of a teams qualification score. In the event of a Tie, the sum of a teams auto score will be used as a tie breaker. Should there still be a tie, the following scores (in order) will be used to break the tie: climb points -> sum of the conjunction of teleop points and foul points -> then random sorting by FMS.
Hope that helps!