[GeeTwo]

Certainly different! I haven't seriously tried to wrap my brain around a swerve drive with pair-coupled wheel speeds and fully independent steering, but I have done a bit of thinking about the transmission.

An inverse differential is a great idea to work around the motor controller dead band, but I don't think this is the right application for it. In the no-friction approximation, a the speed of an inverse differential on the output is equal to the average of the input speeds, and (if frictionless) the torque is equal to the sum of the input torques. If you're driving the wheels in opposite directions, this implies that the speed is equal to half of the difference between the magnitudes of the input speeds, and the output torque is equal to the difference of the magnitudes of the input torques.

If I've done my mental algebra correctly, this implies that if the two motors are driven in opposite directions, the net output power of the inverse differential is never greater than you could have obtained with a single motor at that speed (leaving motor failure out of consideration for the moment). If so, putting two CIMs into such a drive system is just a better way to generate heat than putting two CIMs into an ordinary gearbox; they have enough thermal mass to handle that bit of back driving when you need low speed, low torque (single motor dead band) maneuvers.

It seems to me that a better application for the inverse differential would be for a manipulator arm driven by low-thermal mass, fan cooled motors. You could run them at (for example) 51% and -49% of free speed to get a 1% output speed, while providing plenty of cooling air to both. If I'm figuring things correctly, when under an appropriate load the reverse motor would be running nearly free at around -6V, and the forward motor would be running around 12V (at the top of the power curve), so you could get nearly half of one motor's stall torque at very low (or even zero) speed for a prolonged duration, making it great for holding up elevators and arms without brakes and without releasing the magic smoke.