Quote:
Originally Posted by stevend1994
The closest to that would probably be The New Cool. It's a few years old now, but it does give a nice insight into what their design process was like, and that was the year they created their swerve.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LedLover96
I talked to 1717 at Championship this year and learned that they have designed a completely new swerve since 2009. This year they used independent swerve modules because of the motor allowance, unlike in past years.
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Our first year doing swerve was in fact the 2009 season in the game Lunacy as stated above. Our design process for that year is detailed pretty well in the book,
The New Cool. Each year since 2009, we have decided to continue using swerve.
In the 2010 and 2011 seasons, we found it beneficial to be able to translate from side to side. This was especially true in last year’s game Logomotion when positioning the robot to score. In the past two years, our robot could either translate in any direction or rotate in place. It could not, however, rotate and translate simultaneously due to the mechanical limitations of our motor-gearbox-module-arrangement. Based on our comfort level with the different motors in the kit, we didn’t feel that it was worth taking high powered motors from key mechanisms and allocating them to the drive or using lower power motors to create an independent swerve drive.
This year, however, with the new motor allowance, we were able to allocate 8 motors to the drive and still have enough high quality/power motors remaining to effectively power all of our remaining mechanisms. With those 8 motors allocated to our drivetrain, we were able to create a swerve drive system with 4 independent wheel modules. The independent modules allowed us to implement spinning while driving and pivoting around one wheel.