Quote:
Originally Posted by MichaelBick
A majority of the competitive swerve drive in the past couple of years have had one steering motor per module. Namely teams like 1717, 368, 16, 2471, and many more use it to give them more versatility in the ways they can position their wheels.
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Agreed it gives you more degrees of freedom of control. Thing is you have to be able to control it.
That is the core issue. If you confine your swerve build to just the 6 week build season, even if you buy the modules (which by definition means you just bought someone else's development time), will you be able to achieve good control? The teams I have seen achieve this devoted good time to this task and the reward was fully exploiting it. They often did this work over several seasons or with extensive off season exploration.
Outside that...
I've thought this over quite a bit. As the OP mentions the cost of 4 CIM motors/speed controls to drive steering indepently is pretty high. 8 CIMs risks a good hunk of battery power in addition to driving weight. One could counter that you only use the steering CIMs when you steer but is that not the goal? Assuming one tames the power required or uses a smaller motor with sufficient gearing to steer to overcome this....
Is this really a mere 6 week task to gain a degree of freedom that as others have pointed out risks reducing your ability to drive straight?
If I could do swerve in FRC again (my team's experience was so bad they always opt out) I would not do it with the expectation it will be fully polished in just 6 weeks. I could not justify the risk even if I know the task is doable in the general sense. I can easily see doing swerve outside of FRC where I have my choice of hardware and controls.
Can anyone provide examples of teams that jumped into swerves cold in a 6 week build season and fully exploited it? I am honestly curious my experience is limited to the northeast US. I would be very curious if they bought the modules or borrowed their code to make it work in that timeframe. I can accept it is possible but would like to understand the details.