Mecanum vs. Swerve Drive

[apples000]

If you're considering swerve, here's some advice. Before you decide to go ahead, figure out some basic stuff about the drive train. Make a simple CAD drawing and figure out where the big stuff is going to go and how the modules will be steered and driven. Make sure you spend time to figure out how the control system will work with the swerve. You need to figure out how the steering feedback will work, and if you are doing independent steering/drive, you need to do some math(see Ether's swerve kinematics whitepaper). Finally, try to find a good machining mentor. It helps a TON to have a machinist help make the modules. If you get an experienced machinist to help out, you will avoid making silly mistakes, and you'll get your modules done faster, cheaper, and with stricter tolerances. But if swerve is something your team is really interested in, it will pay off HUGE! My old team attempted to develop a swerve drive during the build season, and we ended up in 45th place in our regional. We qualified for cmp through the chairman's award, refined our drive train during the extra 5 weeks, and once we had all of our problems solved, we ended up on Einstein that year!