Quote:
Originally Posted by ToddF
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 partners 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.
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I just want to echo these statements. I talked to a lot of teams regarding their own mid-season swerve drive attempts this past weekend in St. Louis...there are a LOT of horror stories out there. The easiest way to discourage your team is if you set the table with a high probability of failure...that's what a first attempt, mid-season swerve usually does from talking to most teams. People mention 'unicorn swerve'...I think that term might actually just refer to a successful mid-season attempt because of how rare and magical that success story seems to be.
Also, we're flattered that we've inspired our selfless partners on Triple Helix to give swerve a shot this summer. Please, feel free to contact us with any questions and we'll do our best to help you along. Good luck, guys!