Driving

Drive Team

Contrary to popular belief, the drive team is not there just to watch. In fact, the drive team actually bears the most responsibility during a match. As a drive team member, your job is to keep track of everything. And by everything, I do mean everything. You should know what your teammate is doing, what your opponents are doing, who is winning, who is losing, how much time is left, where your driver should go next to score, who is in a vulnerable position that you can take advantage of, and more. Drive team members should not solely watch their own robot, but instead watch the entire match and take stock of the entire game situation.

One drive team member should stay focused on the time while also talking to the alliance partner’s drive team. Effective communication within an alliance is important to winning. The other drive team member should be focused monitoring the whole game and telling the driver where to go. These are only general roles, which may change slightly depending on the game. For example, in Tower Takeover, one drive team member’s job was always to keep track of the number of cubes of each color each alliance had to determine which color cubes to place in the tower to benefit their own alliance.

Driver

The driver’s only job is to drive the robot. However, this does not mean they do not need to know the game and its rules extremely well. Although the drive team should do their best to tell the driver the best course of action at all times, it is inevitable that the driver will have to make a split second decision in order to win. In a pinch, the driver should be able to fulfill either or both of the drive team member’s jobs, but this is not ideal as it gives the driver too many things to focus on.

Practice

There is no real way to teach someone how to drive. In my experience, the only way to learn to drive is to practice. Depending on the state of completion of your robot, practice can involve many different things. If your robot is only a drivetrain at this point, you can set up obstacle courses to complete or practice driving from point A to point B or simply practice driving to a certain spot and turning your bot to face a certain direction. If you have a mostly or fully completed bot, you should try doing full skills runs to practice your driver skills or play in scrimmages against other teams to get experience in match-like conditions. And if you can’t drive your bot, try watching match videos or come up with new strategies to try.

Driving in a Match

There’s nothing really to say here except to remain calm and be adaptable.