Mecanum vs. Swerve Drive

[avanboekel]

Originally Posted by Madison

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.

I completely agree. But why? On paper, it should be an easy drive to execute.

Edit: What I'm trying to say, is what's the difference between a good and bad mecanum drive?