Yes it shifts, we're so into the style of robots we've been building that there is no way we could give up shifting. It wasn't much work to integrate at all, just a little more weight.
We prefer to cal it a Emporer Swerve or West Cost Swerve instead of Unicorn Drive, Unicorn Drive's can't shift after-all
The entire mechanical design focused on making programming/controls easier, and there are some cool features we plan to implement. Currently the separate incremental encoder and zeroing sensor allow us to never have to zero sensors by hand, or in code. We also plan to have code that detects an encoder failure, locks that wheel straight, and switches to a drivemode without strafe but still the ability to translate forward/back and steer (We had similar functionality on our arm this year). We really are aiming to make this as reliable as possible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JesseK
I'm surprised no one has challenged this claim; such tornado-like moves are the holy grail of FRC movement (IMO) yet I haven't found a single video of a robot actually performing a 360-degree translate-and-rotate move. This drive train is definitely setup to perform the maneuver with its independent controls, and I'd love to see it work -- it's like a video game come to life, tbh.
I like how the crab drive required minimal CNC work. Was the main coaxial shaft split up into plates? If so, you could easily call them poker chips because that's what they'd look like. What was the hardest part of the crab modules manufacturing implementation?
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We currently *could* make that move, but it'd be difficult as the drive would have to continuously change the translation direction. We have the code written for a gyro offset to allow this to switch into field-centric and seamlessly implement the move, but have yet to get a gyro on there. We've really only just barely got to what's pictured, and are shooting for normal functionality first. Low angle (<30*) rotation while driving has been tested and is pretty intuitive.
The main coaxial shaft is actually a very simple lathe part, it's got less operations than the parts you make in the intro to machining classes here at Cal Poly. The Only CNC'd part I believe is what we call the module tophat. We could have made them on our mill, but wanted to pocket them and there are also a few tight tolerances on them. We also don't really count 2d (Water/laser) cutting as CNC as the time investment involved is vastly different.