Drivetrains in Ultimate Ascent

[F22Rapture]

Originally Posted by sgreco

Mecanum are "bad" because they are inefficient.

... snip ...

To add to this:

With mecanums, your weight needs to be equally balanced across the robot. The reason for this is that if the center of gravity is shifted to any one side, the forces will no longer balance properly and you will experience "drift." Unless your robot design minimizes this as much as possible, it will need to be accounted for.

This can be rectified by using gyros, accelerometers, and encoders to adjust the output to the wheels... but at the cost of mechanical, electrical, and programming complexity and decreased robustness.

Properly implemented mecanums can be great in games where their use is justified (high agility). However, it's something that teams should decide early on and take into consideration when deciding every other aspect of the design. It may be a better use of your team's time to optimize a simpler, more standard drivetrain instead.

Just my $.02