Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominick Ferone
Had a team made a swerve drive where only one motor is used to rotate the wheels? I feel this design could maybe save weight as well as save on power consumption/CPU usage. If you had 5 motors instead of 8 then it could draw less power theoretically.
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Generally it is quite a bit more difficult to sync the steering rotation of the wheels if you use more than 1 motor to steer. Considering all you need is one good motor I just can't think of many good reasons to do it with multiple steering motors.
A few years ago FRC11 did steer a swerve drive with 2 steering motors. It did not end well but it did get a programming award trying to sort out the 'Tazmanian Devil' issues with steering and synchronizing 2 position targeted PID loops. It also pushed the limits of what we could pull off with Java on the cRIO because there were many motion control issues that had to be contended with.
Given the 6 week build window there would have to be a great reason to engage in these acrobatics instead of a simple piece of chain and one motor.