[Brandon Holley]

I'll just give my real quick 2 cents because I am compiling a post which contains all of the information from my senior design project at Northeastern University.

My senior design project was the investigation of the most effective drive system one could use in FIRST, followed by the optimization of such a drive and then constructing a prototype. I went through a lot of decision making processes to determine what was most effective. When it came down to it, the argument was exactly what is being argued right now...swerve vs. 6wd. Some of the decisions I made to determine between the two were based on opinion, but this is inherent with this kind of decision. I ended up designing, analyzing, optimizing, building, assembling and testing a swerve system.

The argument between the two was settled for me based on the fact that I feel the only reason people widely consider 6wd more reliable is because they are simply done much more frequently than swerve/crab systems. Yes there are more moving parts in a swerve system, inherently making the system more prone to failure. However, with more evolution of swerve design the systems can become just as reliable as 6wd systems today. Which is why I chose to optimize that system. A new post will be up in a few days which contains my report (>100 pages) and my presentation (~40 detailed slides) which explains what I did and the findings I had.


Brando