Alas, there have been many threads over the years concerning the relationship between Driver, Operator and Coach. But, out of curiosity, how to teams successfully communicate within their alliance during game? Do we leave the communication between each coach to lower noise at the expense of losing time, or does each alliance member communicate to make communication more direct and yet more chaotic. We have tried signs and signals with in bounders (ie with logomotion we had triangle, circle and square shaped ping pong paddles to denote the shape needed on the field) and yet there always seems to be a failure to communicate.
tl;dr Should communication between teams during competition exist between coaches, or the entire team?
I think that there needs to be communication from coach to driver, and driver to coach alike. One way communication does not allow proper feedback from the driver, and so the coach in that case will not have enough information to make the right decisions.
Things vary from team to team and even from alliance to alliance and everyone has their own style but in my experience, the usual flow of communication is something along the lines of: drivers and coach are in constant and frequent communication. Coaches communicate with each other to adjust alliance strategy and then the message is passed on by the coaches to their drivers.
Typically, the drivers job is to focus on the robot and things directly around the robot. Their job is to drive the robot and that is their focus. The “manipulator”, or second driver, should have a slightly wider view point. They should focus mostly on the robot and the task at hand but also be thinking about what the next step is. The coaches job is to step back a level and focus on the big picture. They should try to avoid getting tunnel vision focus on just their robot and instead pay attention to how the match as a whole is going, evaluating different strategies and priorities and planning a few steps ahead. They should pay attention to how their alliances is doing as whole and try and figure out ways the alliance can be more effective as a whole. For example, if they notice that there will soon be a shortage of balls in their offensive zone or a build up in their zone, they should preemptively tell their drivers to shift their focus or alert one of their alliance partners to fill the role. They should also be paying attention to what the other team is doing and trying to anticipate their next move.