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Originally Posted by Nemo
Why is it necessary to do fancy stuff (turning while traveling in a straight diagonal line, etc) in order to have a "good" mecanum drive? The best year for mecanum was 2011. All a mecanum drive needed to do that year was drive >90% of the time as a tank drive and strafe occasionally if that made it easier to line up to hang a tube.
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I think it's less about being fancy and more about ditching the Wile E. Coyote syndrome:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor (for the Coyote explanation)
*Watching matches, I'm often reminded of the cartoons where Wile E. Coyote is trying to outrun a rocket. He could simply dive to the side and the rocket would fly by, but that never occurs to him.
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Mecanums, even (especially) those driving in tank, will attract bad situations more than their high-traction counterparts. These situations can often be avoided or disengaged from more easily via mecanum attributes than tank-driving-mecanum attributes. At the same time, they can also set up a lot of plays that don't benefit (and actually exploit) tanks, but they're exceedingly rare. So there's a ton of Coyotes running around who are utilizing all the negatives of their choice and few of the positives.
For what it's worth, swerves could also spend most of the time driving tank and just swerve when "needed". There's nothing wrong with tank drive. But if you're going to make another DT, be it mecanum or swerve, whose physics provides such starkly different competitive advantages disadvantages (vis-a-vis tank), why wouldn't you leverage the advantages?