Quote:
Originally Posted by Max Boord
Over the years as mecanum drive robots increse in popularity its become incresingly common for teams that seed in the top 8 to penalize 1st round picks for having a mecanum drivetrain. So CD comunity, what does your team do when it comes to mecanum drive robots?
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We're not penalizing anybody. We're picking robots that best complement our robot and the strategy we want to play in the elims.
In 2014, there was no place for a (pure) mecanum drive robot on our alliances. The ability to resist pushing was viewed by us as essential to forming a 3 assist cycle. Resisting pushing with traction allows for "wall" defense and also helps avoid being spun while shooting or ejecting. People argue about whether mecanum can push or not, but they're really missing the point - pushing resistance is where mecanum robots really struggle.
There were some robots at our events that were mecanum drive that played fairly well but without traction they just could not get into and hold position where they needed to be. Setting up truss shots or passes with them was just too difficult when they could be spun by defense. In spite of this, there was just one other robot on our list between our alliance's second pick and a mecanum drive robot at Finger Lakes.
In other years, the "cost" of a mecanum robot versus a traction robot varies. I feel it's worth noting that more often than not the best several teams at a regional are all tank drive. In this case the teams aren't being selected because they aren't mecanum, but because their robots are overall better than the mecanum robots are. In addition, in the somewhat rare event that the best teams at a regional include mecanum robots, these robots tend to have well driven and implemented mecanum drive systems.
To be quite frank, I think a lot of teams that aren't very good pick mecanum drive because they feel like the ability to strafe allows them to drive better with less practice. It seems more trivial to just gun the robot forward into a scoring zone, then strafe to where you actually wanted to be, than it is to drive in a smooth arc up to where you wanted to score. However, without plenty of drive practice, it doesn't matter what your wheels are, you're a lot less likely to be a first round pick at all.
In short, there's almost no situation where all other things equal, a mecanum drive is a net gain over a tank drive for our alliance, and I've observed a correlation between teams choosing mecanum wheels and teams dropping down our pick list due to poor manipulator design.
Also, if you're the kind of team that gives teams grief for making choices differently than you and assume teams were too stupid and biased to pick your obviously superior robot based on its wheels, maybe you're not the kind of alliance partner we would want to work with?
Life is totally random and there's nothing you can do to change that. - kristen [more] 
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