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Originally Posted by Karthik
At this point in history Omniwheels were a rarity, and holonomic drive was completely unheard of. The Kiwi drive turned heads across the country as news of it spread. A true innovation.
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Just one minor clarification, but it might be more correct to say "Omniwheels were a rarity
in the FIRST community." This is not to take anything away from 857 or any of the other early adopters of omnidirectional drive systems. But omnidirectional drives, holonomic drives, and Mecanum have been around for quite a while. The patent for Mecanum wheels (also known as "Swedish wheels") goes back to the 1970s. They were developed by Bengt Ilon, an engineer for the Swedish company Mecanum AB (one paper describing some of the early Mecanum wheel history and designs
can be found here). The Navy used them on commercially-purchased cargo handling systems in the 1980s. Orthogonal holonomic drive systems were first developed in the 1980s. "Killough Platform Drives" were developed by Steve Killough in the early 1990s, based on the
early omnidirectional holonomic drive work he did at Oak Ridge National Labs in 1991-1992.
There have been some truly unique "first ever, anywhere" developments by FIRST teams (the Thunder Chicken's Chicken Drive comes to mind). But many of our developments have been based on our ability to see something developed for, or used in, other applications, and realize that they can be adapted to FIRST-style robots. The skill/ability to do this is extremely valuable, and forms the basis for a lot of creative developments. But we should not forget that these developments are based on the work of others, and we stand on the shoulders of true innovators.
-dave