Omni-wheels and driver-centric drive

[Eko]

Team 868 toyed with this last year, and our experience was mixed.

We used the mecanum wheel system, which allowed for arbitrary translational vectors with arbitrary rotation vectors to describe the movement. Adding the yaw rate gyro offset was easy enough, but the gyro could only report angular velocity values up to a certain speed, something like 80 degrees per second. This was not a valid option for us, as our robot could spin around almost one full revolution per second. That aside however, the code for it was very simple. It turned out to only require a minimum of trigonometry as well, as a lot of the trigonometry falls away when you realize the relationships between the various pairs of wheels. Unfortunately, I don't have the code at hand right now, but I'm sure if you sent an email or PM to one the Team 868'ers on the forum, they could get this year's programmers to dig it up for you.

~Kyle