Mecanum vs. Swerve Drive

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

Over the years I have only seen a few Mecanum bots that have true omnidirectional movement on the field. They could strafe at best. We love to have our way with them. There have been many times where we had to defend a good scoring Mecanum on our alliance from the opposing alliance defense. I have yet to see a Mecanum on the field have control of chassis orientation and drive direction. I would choose a well developed 6 or 8 wheel tank over Mecanum any day.

This, in my mind, is a fundamental component in the debate about the effectiveness of mecanum drive in FRC. It's difficult to make a determination about how effective they can be when a significant number of teams that implement them do so very, very poorly.

The conventional wisdom has been that implementing mecanum has become easy. The wheels are available as COTS parts, the code is shared freely, etc. The reality has been, though, that there's a significant performance discrepancy between the few good implementations and the piles and piles of really terrible ones. That suggests that mecanum really isn't that easy to get right and we should probably be putting it into the same category as WCD or swerve -- perhaps still not in terms of effectiveness, but certainly in terms of knowledge required to do it right.