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Unread 14-04-2014, 21:31
Tyler2517's Avatar
Tyler2517 Tyler2517 is offline
ShortOnes
AKA: Tyler Gibb
FRC #2517 (Evergreen Robotics)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Dec 2013
Rookie Year: 2011
Location: Vancouver, WA
Posts: 203
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Re: Swerve Drive vs Mecanum Wheel drive?

As a Team who has had both a swerve drive and a mecanum drive. I love our swerve drive. In our teams history we have built 2 mecanum drives 2 tank drive's(if lunancy counts) 1 crab drive(failed so bad) and 1 swerve(2014).

In 2010 my team attempted a crab drive(they call it a swerve). At that time my team did not use cad. The drive was huge 80/90 pounds and did not work... ended up trying to keep it driving straight with zip ties....

In 2011 we did the first mecanum drive. This was the best performing robot up to this point we used the standard AM frame. When using it we never had problems with being pushed. It was very slow though much slower then i would have liked and the drive frame was heavy.(i think our team just builds heavy drives) But it was still a good drive.


2013 We went back to our mecanum drive this time using lighter gear box's. this drive could not strafe very well at all. The rollers had way to much friction. We got pushed around a lot. Even though it was geared on the high end it never reached that speed. Could not drive straight at all. We got it to work in the end but not nearly as well as in 2011

2014 We built a 4 wheel independent swerve.

My team has never had very good metal working tools. We had a plazma cam that we used a lot but when our metal shop teacher passed the new one wanted nothing to do with us. Losing us all of our metal working tools. We do have a very small CNC that breaks a lot. (it was on a total of 30 minutes the whole year). but one of our mentors has access to a cnc shop that we can use.(limited use) The day of kick off we lost our best mechanical student and our coach.
But that did not stop us. We had to travel to Portland Community Collage they have mills and laths we can use their (all manual). Me and my sister managed to manual mill/lath the swerve in 4 weeks. The first week was updating the design. We then pulled 3 weeks of going to school/machining as our whole life. We used a mentors CNC shop for some parts that their were to many of to manually make or to tight on tolerances for a total of less then 5 hours of CNC work.
If their is a want their is a way.

The performance of the swerve drive was a dream. It is the fastest drive we have ever built. It can also plow our mecanum drive our of the way in static tests in the shop.(on official carpet) It was very powerful. It was also 4 pounds lighter then last years mecanum drive and 10 lighter then 2011. With each modular weighing in at 7 pounds 4-8 ounces. The swerve drive out performed every drive we have ever built up to date.

Half of the reason i am in favor of the swerve drive over mecanum is that it presents real engineering problems. The felling our team got when it was driving for the first time was truly amazing. We got our first engineering awards this year because of it. It was a lot of work but it was worth it even if we did not win.
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