[barn34]

For us, we decided to go swerve on day 2 of build season this year. We ordered modules from AndyMark, received them a day or so later, and then the mechanical team focused on building up our practice drive chassis so we could completely hand that over to our programming team. If I remember correctly, we had the chassis completed and transferred to the programmers the first weekend of build season.

While our programming team worked tirelessly to get everything functional with the swerve, the rest of the mechanical and design teams worked away on the rest of the robot design making sure to carefully keep all of the space claim and wiring for the swerve in mind. By the end of week 3, our programmers had the basic fuctionality of the swerve built, tested, and working. We continued to make tweaks, improvements, and additional control features and options (field centric, various spin moves, forward/reverse orientation toggles, etc.) as we continued through the rest of build and competition season. One benefit was that once the mechanical was worked out and locked down, everything else related to the drive (for the most part) was purely software which could be endlessly improved, tweaked, tested, troubleshooted, etc. throughout the season.

Don't get me wrong, I probably wouldn't recommend teams taking the same approach as we did of trying to do this for the first time during a build season. Tackling swerve was a pretty huge challenge (especially from the programming side) and I am extremely proud of our team for accomplishing our goals as well as we did this year. Even so, we are knowingly infants in our swerve drive knowledge and we've actively looked to learn as much as we can from experienced teams (shoutouts and special thanks to 16 and 1717) throughout this season.

Also, driver practice is key. In order for all that hard work to really pay off, your drivers have to be able to make that thing hum on the field. We had our drivers working with that practice chassis quite a bit from that week 3 point onwards throughout the season to be able to perform as desired come competition time. We set up driver drills with cones, balls, goals, defensive proxies, etc. to make sure we had all of the on-field tools we ever thought we'd need in our toolbox to dive into while on the field.

With all that said, I definitely recommend any team give swerve a shot. We couldn't be happier with how our machine was able to perform this year given our initial lack of experience. Just know, it isn't a simple drive train by any means and there are far more modes of potential failure than a traditional tank or mechanum drive. It's very programming and control intensive, but it is a worthwhile challenge to undertake. This isn't just for the performance benefits you would potentially receive on the field, but your team would benefit greatly from the learning experience of taking on the challenge (and that's what the REAL benefit should be, right?).

If anyone has any questions, comments, suggestions, etc. please feel free to contact myself or any other member of my team and we'll be happy to help steer you along as best we can using our previous year's experience and lessons learned. Best of luck and congradulations to any team eager to take on the challenge!