[kwojcik]

Control wise, swerve drive is extremely intuitive to me having play a LOT of FPS video games. The past 2 years we have had 2 2-axis joysticks for the driver (2 more for the co-driver), left hand controls all x/y translational movement, right hand controls rotation. Anyone who has played Halo before should be able to drive our robot.

Having done swerve 2 years in a row I might be a little biased, but the programming for a swerve drive seems quite simple to me if you approach position control the right way. We encapsulate a potentiometer and a motor into an object called a "steering motor", which is completely self contained with all of its own control and PID code; you have a goToAngle(angle) function that you call, and then the steering motor object takes care of everything else. We used 2 steering motor objects for our drive train this year and last, only changing port and PID constants for the most part.

The great advantage about encapsulating a motor and potentiometer for position control is that its usable in many places on robots(turrets, swerve modules, kickers, arms, etc) and the code is completely plug-n-play (aside from tuning PID constants and maybe limiting the possible angles). We used the exact same code to control the angle of our turret and drive train last year, with the desired angle for the PID code coming from the camera(or joystick under manual control) and joystick respectively.

The is the main reason why I made this post is to encourage teams who might be afraid of complicated PID implementations everywhere. If you do it once correctly, you won't have to do it again. Simplifying a few things slightly, you can always change the steering motor object around a little bit, and abstract out its desired angle so you can give it desired encoder ticks instead and use a driving motor instead of turning, and now you have PID distance control.