Hehe, ready? =)
To drive our robot, we have one joystick, and one dial hooked up to a pot. The dial is used to change the orientation of our wheels by matching its pot to the pot hooked up to the steering chain on our robot. The wheels (all four of them) stay parallel to each other, thus if the dial is turned 90 degrees to the left, all the wheels would be pointing left in relation to the frame of our robot. The Joystick is mainly used for throttle, although here comes the fun part:
I programmed the power output to the wheels to respond just like a tank drive would. This allows us to easily change the orientation of our frame, which would not have been controllable otherwise. Now, if you truly understand how all that works, you would have noticed that once the wheels turn past 45 degrees in orientation, a simple left turn tank style would do nothing because the wheels would start canceling out. This is because what used to be the left side of the robot, is now actually the front or rear. To correct this, I simply swapped two of the corner outputs once the pot read that it was turned passed 45 degrees (and swap them again if it was passed 135 degrees). This corrects the problem quite nicely, and lets me have a fun time driving the thing =)
So basically... we have 360 degrees of movement, and we can 'crab' from side to side (or diagonal to diagonal) like a goalie strafing to protect the 'goal', mua ha ha. We call this complicated system of technical hoopla, Swerve Drive... how many degrees does your robot handle?
