FRC T-bone-ing and Hexagonal drive

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by EricH

Question (somewhat rhetorical): As it relates to being the victim of a T-bone pin, does swerve (or mecanum, or other omnidirectional drives) help you get out, or make the problem worse? What about if you're trying to place the T-bone?

In regards to swerve, we didn't do enough testing with this in mind to make scientific statements. That being said based on the three we've run, I would think it would make it easier to get out of T-bones in a perfect world. I'd highly recommend not investigating swerve as a t-bone solution. There are so many points in a swerve drive where the increased load from being t-boned could cause your gearing to experience increased friction and make the situation worse.

Our experience running butterfly in 2013 offseason made it seem well suited for that style of safe zone to safe zone sprinting, but we also ran a normal 6wd that year and had similar performance.

It's hard to say for sure, there are many variables involved with the implementation (and how its' driven) that matter a great deal, so it's not as simple as X drive versus Y drive.



The best thing to do is to proto and test what you want to run if this is a performance advantage you are going for. Designing your setup to be a modification of the AndyMark or Vex kit drives would make this iteration easier for most teams.