Quote:
Originally Posted by LeelandS
Mecanums get a bad rep around here for some reason I can't fathom.
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Here's a reason why mecanum drives get picked on: It's hard to scout defensive potential well. And mecanum wheels are a proxy for being bad at defense.
At a regional, most of the teams that would make the best defenders are playing offense during the qualifications. And here's why I think that is: Suppose a team can score 25 pts if they go offense, or reduce the opposing alliance's score by 25%. So then they should play defense if and only if 25% of the opponent's expected score is >25 pts. Once you get to eliminations, there will be better opponents, so playing defense will make more sense.
So in figuring out who the best defenders are you end up doing a lot of guesswork. You can try to keep track of pushing matches won or lost but that's about it because so many don't play and defense during quals. So then you're left with pit scouting. Not all mecanum-drive robots are easy to push around, but if you're picking a robot to play defense (or counter-defense) then the scouts have to be sure that the robot you pick won't get pushed around by an average kitbot.
So from this you get teams, like mine, who have used a formula for picking the third robot that looks approximately like this:
1) Eliminate robots likely to be bad at pushing (such as mecanums or omnis)
2) Find max( [average auto pts scored] + [average climb pts scored] )
Mecanums are useful, and using them can improve your robot's performance. However, remember that the teams in eliminations aren't the 24 best teams. They're the top seeds plus whoever those teams think would give their alliance the best chance to win.
Now to the original question, mecanums or swerve: Why not holonomic?