Disadvantages of swerve/crab

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Ether

In the above context, "the best controls" sounds like you are referring to the driver interface. What driver interface did you finally decide was the best for your team?

Sure thing! Best is the wrong word too, "better" is the correct choice. We started off with a single 3D Pro joystick to control the drive system, but did not get a chance to figure something else out until later in the season which was using a joystick for throttle and then used the 3d joystick for rotation. It isn't best, but it was as far as we got before we decided to put off swerve until future offseason projects. But even then, we ended up using the override button on the joysticks which turned it into a 4 wheel tank drive most of the time.

Originally Posted by Ether

Could you elaborate just a bit and list the top three (or whatever) things that made the learning curve huge and which took a long time to figure out? It might be helpful for other teams on the verge of making a similar decision.

I'd say some of the biggest issues we had were 1. being dumb and not using a 1:1 reduction for the rotation, 2. getting the modules perfectly synched, and 3. realizing too late that we should have used higher quality sensors than we did.

Big problem was that our drivers expected a perfect response time from the modules everytime they wanted to move somewhere, but our gearing and sensors significantly delayed response time.