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Originally Posted by E Dawg
159 is considering switching to a swerve drive next year.
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Good for you. Pushing your boundaries in drive train technology is a first step in making a big leap forward in competition performance.
That said, the time to do drive train development is in the summer off-season, not during build season. The field is littered with teams who tried to develop swerve during build season, then crashed and burned.
Note that there are a number of COTS swerve modules available these days. If you do not modify them, they can be reused during the build season. Buy yourself a set of swerve modules and build a development bot over the summer. Have your mechanical team become familiar with the swerve modules, and get in at least one iteration on building the frame and other drive train components. Work with other teams with successful swerves to develop your control system when you aren't under the gun. Then, when build season hits, you'll have a successful iteration under your belt and can hit the ground running.
We had our lessons learned and summer brainstorming meeting last night, and are considering developing swerve this summer, inspired in large part by our fantastic alliance partner 2481. But, we would never consider waiting until build season to do it.
In the past two years we've limited the choices of possible drive train designs on our competition bot to ones we have successfully used recently or prototyped over the summer, and also have the COTS parts sitting on the shelf ready to go. In other words, summer is for technology development (and demos), fall is for skills development (and demos), build season is for execution.