Has anyone made a swerve drive that's run on one motor?

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Dominick Ferone

Had a team made a swerve drive where only one motor is used to rotate the wheels? I feel this design could maybe save weight as well as save on power consumption/CPU usage. If you had 5 motors instead of 8 then it could draw less power theoretically.

The archetypal example of crab drive (that is, a number of swerve modules all steered together) is Tumbleweed, 148's FIRST Overdrive robot, which had three wheels all driven off of one massive drive train. Because Tumbleweed had no manipulators, the orientation of the robot did not matter so crab was perfect. If you have a manipulator on a crab robot, you will almost certainly need to have that manipulator be able to rotate relative to the chassis to achieve what the chassis does not.