[LeelandS]

I can't speak to Holonomic drive at the FTC level, but I can give you a little more insight on the Holonomic drive at the FRC level. I've never been part of a Holonomic project first-hand, so you may want to take what I say with a grain of salt.

I had a conversation a year or two ago with a team that was using Holonomic. Since I'd never seen the drive up-close before, I was pretty excited about it. The team told me the biggest issue they had on the programming end was the non-standard driving. That is, as he put it, "there's not really a way to just drive forward." That's obviously a result of the angling of the wheels, and none of them being pointed straight forward normally. As stated above, you'll be able to find a great amount of while papers on the subject of getting the wheels to work out well.

From the mechanical standpoint, I can't offer you much aside from what I've seen in pictures. On that note, I can say it doesn't LOOK terribly difficult. The biggest problem I've heard people have is not having the wheels lined up correctly (at 90 degree intervals). That's something you need to be wary of. Again, don't put a lot of stock in that. The mechanical difficulty wasn't something that came up much in the conversation.

The best advice I can offer is browse the media and white paper section, looking for examples of Holonomic drive systems and documents about how to program them.