Mecanum or Swerve?

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by sidkulk

I think the choice between mecanum and swerve lies in where your robot is best suited to play (offense/midfield/defense).

Offense: Swerve
From watching quite a few matches, swerve seems alot better suited to collect balls and maneuver them into the goal.

Midfielf: Swerve
When your playing the midfield balls constantly keep entering, so you need to be able to quickly "pick up" balls from your zone. And if your in the midfield, theres a higher chance of you needing to go over the bump. So if you use mecanum it seems you need to drive straight to go over on mecanum, but you can go also sideways with swerve over the bump

Defense: Mecanum
Mecanum seems better here because its alot easier to get from goal to goal and just block the goal from other robots scoring.

No - at least not by our scouting methods. Mecanum robots are immediately removed from our defensive pic list, as are robots with slick wheels / omni wheels. A decently geared robot with traction wheels will have no problem moving a robot with slick/omni or mechanum out of their way and scoring.

Mechanum are a neat idea (as are omni wheels), but once you bring robot to robot contact into the equation, I'd much rather have robots with traction that won't get pushed out of the way easily.

Regarding any lag time with swerve modules: If you have it programmed correctly, your swerve modules should never have to turn more than 90 degrees from any given point. When you keep in mind that a tank drive has to "turn" before it drives forward, there really is no lag in a well-done swerve drive when compared to a tank drive. When you take into account acceleration time, there really isn't any lag in a swerve compared to a mechanum either.

You may want to note, however, that except for a few teams, most teams do NOT do swerve every year. Even teams that have done swerve, generally don't repeat it much. That's because it takes so much time, machining, programming etc to make it work well.

Swerve is that thing that every team has to try at least once. They try it, they may win a couple engineering awards with it: then most teams rarely do it again.