[dtengineering]

Wow! Did you ever get a lot of responses, quickly, on this one thread. You'd think you had posted a game hint for next year, or something!

But you asked two questions... one was:

"What should we build?"

and the other was "What does your team prefer?"

Those are two entirely different questions.

Frankly, I really don't think that the "What does your team prefer?" question is relevant to the choice that you have to make. First of all, very, VERY few teams or people posting here will have built and worked with BOTH mecanum and swerve drive systems. Many people will have SEEN both systems in action... and a few will have built and worked with both... but very few will be able to give you a first hand opinion on what they prefer.

What you need to consider is WHY you want to build a robot in the off season. Do you want to build it to work on design and machining skills? Do you want to improve programming skills? Do you just want to get first hand experience with at least one form of omni-directional drive? Do you want to have a cool demo robot? All of the above?

We have built a mecanum... but not a swerve. It was pretty easy to build... but took a bit of work to program (at least if you want 4 wheel PID speed control on an IFI control system... the cRio should make it a bit easier.) Unless you choose to build your own wheels, or develop a fancy suspension system, a mecanum drive is a very simple build challenge... particularly if you use a direct drive from either a Banebots or AM gearbox.

Outside of the discussions surrounding FRC competition robots... which are really kind of irrelevant to an off-season build project, the #1 advantage of a mecanum drive is that 99% of the people on this planet have no idea what a mecanum wheel is... and aside from a brief shot of a forklift on the recent Star Trek movie... have never seen one, either. Think about that... these wheels fit in a STAR TREK movie! Honestly, there is not much that is cooler from a teacher's viewpoint than watching a grade 10 explain to a P.Eng how your wheels work.

If you're looking for a bigger machining challenge, however, a swerve has all sorts of intricate parts that need to fit together just so. Sure, you can buy some COTS parts now to make that easier... but you are still working on a more mechanically complex system.

That is the reason we have avoided swerve up until now... we just don't have the manufacturing resources (mostly human resources... we've got the machines...) to confidently put together a good working swerve during build season. It would certainly be less daunting a task if we had built one as an off-season project.

But your team needs to think about why you want to build this thing... what you want it to be able to do... how much you want it to cost (in terms of money AND time invested in it) and then go with the machine that will make your team a better team.

Who knows... we might be back on regolith next year... maybe we'll have to climb stairs, or maybe the field will be made of corrugated iron. Or maybe wheels will be outlawed entirely.

Focus on the team, not the machine, and you can't go wrong.

Jason