[Abhishek R]

An aside from the swerve vs. tank and "build to win" vs "build because it's cool" debate (all of which have arguments for):

Regardless of the drivetrain, something I have found common among the best of the best teams is that they have a drivetrain that they have iterated so much that it is pretty much a science for them. Examples include 16 and 1717's swerves or 254's WCD. I don't know what timeframe it takes the former two teams, but from 254's build blog, aside from minor changes, the luxury of having a drivetrain they know works seems to allow them to be done with it maybe 2 weeks into the build season. This allows them to focus on the other parts of the robot for the majority of the season and really produce a highly sophisticated machine. I don't think my team finished our prototype robot's drivetrain until week 4 of the build season last year (although some of that has to do with no CAD to be able to pull from for a new design - especially as it was our first year with true WCD, and the fact that we do all machining in house which as sanddrag pointed out really puts some limitations on your time and resource usage).

On another note regarding the competition debates: I am firmly in the build to win camp. From Kickoff to the end of the the last competition, I am thinking about how we can build a robot that will maximize our score in any given match, and all my strategies and design revolve around one goal - winning the match. If that results in a "simple" robot (which it never does, I wish it would for the sake of consistency and ease of maintenance) then that's completely fine with me. However, I understand that everyone has different goals, and I recognize the different viewpoints of different people.

Something I don't agree with at all is the notion that a few people seem to have that if you're not building a swerve drive you're not really experimenting or pushing yourself to the extremes of drivetrain innovation. There's a few things wrong with this, the first being that some people regard swerve a bit too highly in this thread - having a swerve drive, even a really good swerve system with great programming and great drivers, will not necessarily give you a very large advantage. I saw some of the best swerve drives from this year still get bogged down by defenders. A lot of people make an assumption that if you have good drivers, you will be able to navigate through defense - however, the people across the field are not idiots, those teams probably have good drivers as well.

We build a prototype last year that a few teams have begun iterating called the Grasshopper drive, which combines the advantages of butterfly with WCD and uses only COTS items or easy to manually mill parts. It was a successful experiment for us and we will likely use the system again, game permitting. We learned quite a few things, and it wasn't swerve. It doesn't even come CLOSE to the complexity of swerve. We were able to compete with and against some of the highest level swerve drives this year. I have yet to see a team that makes me think, "if we don't have swerve, we're gonna get rolled over in competition." This is all just my opinion however, and I do agree that swerve is a great technical challenge. But to say it is the best drivetrain hands down would be a little misguided.