I was just wondering what other team’s programmers do on the field because I heard quite a few programmers were also the drivers.
A. Driver 1(Primary)
B. Driver 2(Secondary)
C. Human Player
D. Coach
E. Other
F. Nothing (Sit in Stands)
Half of our programmers were part of our pit crew. Other two did scouting.
I’d expect scouting to be a fairly common task, as many teams seem to be using some sort of electronic information database.
I’m the Coach, but I’m not only the programmer for my team.
It depends on what our current status is. We have a programmer on drive crew if:
- We want to study our autonomous
- We want to debug some aspect of our robot programming and we have no time off field
- We just can’t figure out the controls and have our programmers handle/advise the driver
- We are downloading a program during the move from pit to field
- We are adding code while queued.
Otherwise, we usually don’t have any programmers on the drive crew.
Jay is our main driver, and I run the arm. It’s nice to have programmers out there all the time, as we can diagnose the little control problems faster than a person who didn’t spend 6 weeks or more coding the robot. Knowing why a robot does what it does is often very important out on the field.
I get to stand around near the field and watch everything. If something happens that the driver’s didn’t intend, then I have to know what really happened and what was supposed to happen and fix it. 
I’ve never been on the drive team…
More often than not, I’ll watch our matches, usually apart from the rest of the team - it’s easier to focus when you’re not surrounded by cheering people. 
I try to pay attention to what the robot is doing and what looks like it’s going wrong. When it’s not match time…
I tend to do a bit of everything when we’re not competing. I’ve been in the pits, working on the program and/or the robot itself. I’ve been a gofer, running around to find our drivers so they can strategize for the next match. I’ve done scouting. I talk to other teams in an attempt to forge friendships with them. Heck, I’ve programmed robots for other teams before…like 507 in Palmetto.
I do whatever needs to be done, basically. I think they’re happy as long as I don’t touch the robot - bad things tend to happen when I do that. 
At a few practice runs I was able to drive. At one competiton round I was able to drive also. At our first competition I came on the field to make any changes to the autonomous right a way. At the second competition I had to sit in the stands and watch or helped the scouting team.
We have like 3-4 programmers (3 going to Nats) and we don’t go in the booth. I wanted to become a coach, but that didn’t work out and now we have a senior doing it I believe and he has done a very good job. I’m only a sophmore though so I have a couple years to be able to get into the booth and next year, the build/programming crew will be all juniors pretty much with some sophmores as well.
In the pit, we usually hang around because our coaches want something new to get programmed. our robot didn’t get completely done until our 2nd regional, chesapeake was pretty much all debugging. At nats, we need a program that can get the ball, so i’m guessing that our programmers will be in the pit again.
I’m not a programmer myself, but usually the few programmers that do go to competition (not like we have a ton anyway) work on programming the Daisy, scouting or sitting in the stands. They don’t spend time building the robot and often times don’t understand the intricacies of it, so the drivers wind up being people from the build crew. On our team, anyone can be in the booth, IF they show that they can do the job better than anyone else and they are consistent, regardless of their position on the team.
Role on the field? How about field announcer! I worked on the programming, drawings and yes announcer at the Palmetto Regional. I’m an engineer/mentor for 343 MIM.
Well, scapegoat generally :-p
During the midwest regional, I spent most of my time in the pits, and at the lonestar one, I was givin the job of running around the stands and making lots of noise… Some programming I did from the stands to get inspiration from other teams competing, and ya…
Wait your programmers don’t also help build well that must be boring.
I end up doing working on all parts of the robot.
we only use one driver this year, the second driver is used to pass balls to the human player. as for programmers like i said i drive and program.
our drive team is made up of those who do it best
Well… It turns out that like, as far as our team goes, we have like 6 programmers/elecrical guys who tend to break mechanical stuff when they try to help with it… I personally wish I was more mechanically inclined, or knew slightly more about mecchanical stuff so I could help out, but ya, we have a set of people with a vrey narrow and set skillset
Our team programmer was also the driver this year. Apparantly we had a second programmer, but apparantly he did next to nothing in regards to that.
I’m a good programmer myself, but unfortunately have no experience when it comes to robot input/output, so the limit of my source code involvement was debugging the main programmer’s code.
I’m hoping next year I can take a few crash courses with my team’s teacher (who also teaches all the electronics programming stuff) so I can take a more active role in the coding of the robot.
Oh, and by the way, I was the field coach 
Oh, I tend to fry electronics. OI, fisher price motors, … :yikes: