Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
There's a billion threads on this before but I"ll add my personal inexperienced cents.
All drive trains are tradeoffs, and neither of these are exceptions. Mecanum drives do not respond well to defense, and can have high power draw. Swerve eliminates the defense problems at the expense of a heavier, tougher to build, less durable drivetrain and tricky programming. Given an infinitely good shop / mentors / resources / machining / programming, I'd pick swerve over mecanum always (but a 6 wheel drive is sometimes better than both), but that's obviously not the case.
If you've never built a swerve before this year, don't start now. It's too late.
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I'll add on to that. Swerve drive also takes a lot of resources. Unless you do coaxial swerve (drive all of the wheels off of a central gearbox), you'll use probably three or four CIMs + whatever you're using to turn the wheels. In addition, it takes up a lot of space in comparison to mecanum drive. This year, where almost all interaction with the ball is below the bumper zone, you might not want to take that space under your bumper zone to put all the components of a swerve drive (then again, you also might decide that it's worth it).
In terms of complexity, as noted above, swerve is pretty ridiculous compared to mecanum. In addition, as a backup plan on mecanum, you can switch out your wheels for traction wheels.