MECHANUM means your priority list should be: lose, break a wheel, make excuses, drive sideways...
This story needs a bit of context so bear with me.
Yesterday the students sat down and decided to organize priorities for strategy. While discussing this strategy our school sponsor/coach/mentor/superhero needed to go home and the discussion carried on. After a long talk and discussion we decided on what we thought was a fairly strong strategy and list of priorities. One thing that was clearly established with this strategy before the coach left was that mecanum was not ideal for our strategy.
At that point we sent
this photo to our school sponsor/coach/mentor/superhero and IMMEDIATELY we got a call from him asking what was going on with the conversation. We pretended there was static, he asked if we were kidding, I asked when did we get kittens, he hung up with a sigh.
Then came the update on facebook, I explained that the students decided on what we would call a MecHanum drive base, this drive base consists of four mecanum wheels in the standard layout, and an omni wheel running perpendicular to those wheels in the center of the robot making it a hybrid of an h drive and a mecanum robot. Best of both worlds.
After explaining this we got this response about our strategic priorities...
"MECHANUM means your priority list should be: lose, break a wheel, make excuses, drive sideways"
I then explained the thought process behind it.
"Alright, alright hear me out. If we have a mecanum drive and we have an omni wheel in the middle and a gyro when we get pushed sideways we can push back with the omni wheel. It's great for defense. And we cant get stuck on a platform cause the omni wheel can move in any direction. Its perfect."