Quote:
Originally Posted by Gdeaver
Ok, for the teams that did swerve for the first time this year, was it worth it. Do you feel that it gave you a competitive advantage?
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YES!!!
We decided day 2 of the build season we were going to go with a swerve drive. The general decision making paradigm was that due to the lack of a crazy pyramid to climb or any end game for that matter the rest of the robot was not going to be that complex. Therefore we thought we would have enough time to figure out a swerve drive. Having never done one before we reached out to a new company in the area for funding so we could build 2 drive trains. One was built the first week and given to the programmers and the second became the actual robot. We bought 118 style swerve modules from AndyMark and wrote the code from scratch. We did reference 16's code base to ensure we were on the right track from time to time.
We firmly believe and demonstrated in Wisconsin that our swerve drive gave us the additional competitive edge needed to win. The extra agility that the swerve drive provided allowed us to play very effective defense and quickly out maneuver our opponents to score. We took a gamble and it paid off with our first blue banner ever.