Swerve Drive vs Mecanum Wheel drive?

[Abhishek R]

Originally Posted by lcoreyl

zero appealing aspects? How about the tiny fraction of time to design and implement compared to the other holonomic drives (some with “unappealing” rollers) which receive your blessing? I’m not sure how giving such a strong opinion without mentioning any characteristics or tradeoffs is useful.

Okay, let me preface this with a few things. First, I don't consider the benefits of mecanum over other holonomic drives, I dislike them equally. Second, I currently drive an H-drive 50% of the time (we're using a version of nonadrive this year), so I feel I have a bit of credibility to what I was saying. I stated a few reasons earlier here and in the omni v mecanum thread as well.

The *consensus* is that mecanum and omni wheels can be pushed around because they have rollers on them as well as already being a wheel in the inherent nature of a ... wheel. This is typically considered their drawback. My favorite drive train are the slide drives because they seem to do just that, they make the field your ice rink and you bounce effortlessly of of other robots and the field. This has been great in previous years due to the existence of safe zones, but now we forward to 2014. No safe zones, and now you find yourself unable to get to your preferred shooting location because you're getting knocked around. That's when the stability of a traction system found on many butterfly and octacanum drives comes in. I have seen brakes on more teams this year than I have before (2848, 1523, 118, etc.).

At this point, people like to continue to make the claim that if you have a mecanum drive train, you shouldn't be in any pushing matches anyway, you should just outmaneuver your tank drive opponent. This is true up to a point. You will meet teams that will match your every step with a regular skid steer system, and then not only will you not be able to get around them, you won't be able to do much until the aggressor basically decides to leave you alone.

There are times for omnidirectional drives, but I never see a use for a pure mecanum or omni system.