Mecanum Drive - Help

[JesseK]

By using the (much slower) sideways motion for distance movement, they effectively lowered their scoring potential.

There should be no reason a mecanum drive moves sideways slower than it does forward/backward, unless the team was using rollers that were a.) not at 45 degrees or b.) tightened to gain more forwards/backwards grip at the cost of sideways speed or C.) flawed via code that wasn't producing the maximum PWM signal when it should have been -- I saw that in a VEX algorithm at this weekend's Va. FTC tournament. In either case it was a design decision that also hurt them in their implementation, not necessarily just the driving decisions.

Ideally, mecanums should be able to produce truely holonomic drive trains; FRC simply lacks the processing on the controller to properly calculate the unit vectors for smooth movement. As a reault most teams settle for a 16-sector lookup table or dump that altogether and stick with robot-centric (normal skid + a bit of lateral sideways movement).