Strategic Uses of Swerve Drive

[sgreco]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

So a few mentors / students / teammates and I were talking on the way back from IRI about the strategic benefits of swerve drive in competition this year. As we have never built a swerve and have often desired omnidirectional movement, seeing many successful swerve teams at IRI (111, 71, 16, 33, sorry if I left you out) was rather inspiring. One person went so far as to say that in general if a team knows how to build a swerve, they shouldn't opt out of it.

Being a little apprehensive about new, cool, shiny, breakable ideas, I did some research and talked to a few people and noticed that nearly every team that builds swerve drives chooses not to in specific years, or sometimes never again. Basically, what I'm wondering is for the "swerve teams" to answer a few questions for my team... (I have a few ideas as to answers, but I have no experience...)

What thought process do you guys go through to determine if a swerve chassis has strategic benefit for a particular year?

Why don't you build a swerve every year? What are the drawbacks?

Have you ever regretted the choice to build a swerving chassis?

Any answers would be appreciated. Thanks!

A couple things from my perspective.

If you've never built a swerve for a season or as a prototype, it's probably not a good idea to build it for the first time during the build season.

Swerve can take a while to perfect. My team did a prototype swerve in 2008, then we used it for the 2008 and 2009 games, and it's just starting to drive straight.

Reasons teams don't do swerve every year include...1. Hard to control. 2. Heavy. 3. Bigger time commitment than traditional skid steers. 4. Swerve appears to offer more funcionality than it actually does.

I'm not saying don't do swerve, but It's not as big an advantage as people typically think.

Swerve has it's advantages, but it also has it's drawbacks. In my opinion, swerves drawbacks outweigh the advantages.

Just for an example, 1114 and 968 had no trouble manuevering with the best of them in 2008 with 6 wheel skids. True they are both pretty awesome teams, but I'm just saying that skid steers can compete with any level of drivetrain.

If you are going to make a swerve a drive, make sure you do some research and some prototyping.

(My opinion is biased against swerve, but as you mentioned there are certainly teams that have it that dominate).