[Nemo]

Definitely a funny picture! Hopefully everybody else who has read the mecanum vs 6WD threads enjoys it as much as I did.

I don’ t see too many people making huge generalizations in this thread, which is good.

Here is what I will add:

1) Mecanum is in some ways easier to drive than 6WD. This is because it gives you room for error. If you miss your route to a scoring peg by a bit, you simply correct it in 1-2 seconds by strafing. You don’t need to learn ridiculously complicated drive maneuvers – just drive it like a tank and strafe when appropriate. I’m not advocating sloppy driving– I’m saying that it probably takes more practice time to be a really effective 6WD operator, because it takes longer to adjust if you miss. This is relevant for teams that don’t have a practice robot / practice field or highly experienced FRC drivers. Know of any teams like that?

2) Mecanum is approximately even with 6WD in a few categories that I have seen occasionally cited as advantages for 6WD: complexity, cost, and weight. As a basis for comparison, I’m using “kitbot on steroids” as the 6WD, compared to 6” mecanum drive direct driven with with Toughbox Nanos. The mecanum drive costs about $300 more – not a giant amount when you spend $5000+ on the kit. The weight is about the same, and it’s not really any more difficult to assemble and program than a basic 6WD. The code is provided to everyone. You can bolt a mecanum drive to the kit frame in a week and then focus on the rest of the robot, just as you can with 6WD.

3) This year we had a relatively narrow scoring zone to share with our alliance partners, and the other team was not allowed to drive into it. A mecanum robot can spend most of its time in that protected zone if somebody is feeding tubes, which partially eases the vulnerability to pushing defense. We looked at that situation and went with mecanum, thinking it would help us score faster in tight quarters. One can look back at that reasoning and argue that we made a poor tradeoff, but we did have sane reasoning to go by. It is going a bit too far to generalize to the effect that there can never be a valid reason to select a mecanum drive.

4) At the regional level, mecanum drives held up pretty well. Plenty of teams have brought home regional banners using a mecanum drive along with solid manipulators / driving / etc. There’s nothing wrong with that.
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Overall, I am more of a fan of 6WD after seeing how good the best of them looked on the field this year. I was surprised and impressed by how quickly and easily some of the 6WD drivers were able to hang tubes – essentially, their driving skill gave their 6WD robots the benefits we were looking for out of a mecanum drive. That was an eye opener. We are happy with our robot and our accomplishments from this year, but we’ve been playing with 6WD prototypes this summer and will probably bring some traction next year.