Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
Not to take away from innovation and technical achievement, but I don't really see the Nonadrive as some kind of new Holy Grail in FRC drivetrains, and it is absolutely not something a team without the engineering resources to design a direct drive mecanum drive should do. It's not exactly a cheap, light, or simple drivetrain.
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Actually, I would make the opposite argument. Mechanically a Nonadrive (one that does not need to cross bumps) is only slightly more complicated than a standard 6wd robot. Remember, the perpendicular wheel does not need to raise or lower if it is a flat field. From a programming standpoint it is much much simpler. The hardest part about mechanum drive machines is controlling them. It involves either lookup tables and interpolating results or using lots of sins and cosines or matrices (Thank you Ether). A nonadrive is simple in that for translation all you need to do put the Y component of your translation stick to the left and right drive motors and the X component to the cross drive motor(s) Rotation is a little trickier but you could just scale the left and right based on your rotation input. Either way, much simpler than mechanum.
It should also come out near the weight of a mechanum drive train. Remember mechanum needs 4 gearboxes, Nonadrive needs 3. Yes Nonadrive requires 4 cylinders but if you were planning on using air anyway that is not a ton of weight.
I will admit that the Nonadrive has, at least after a cursory glance, more failure points.
TLDR, there are benefits and drawbacks to both systems (like any systems) but neither one is inherently more complicated.
EDIT: Appended note about Ether's solution.