Mecanum or Swerve?

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by ajlapp

This is the reason we wanted to introduce commercial swerve components to the market. There is always lots of discussion amongst the community about how to keep FIRST competitive....

I disagree with making the game easier or artificially leveling the playing field through other means.

I'd much rather see a large portion of teams building high quality robots by using off-the-shelf items when necessary to bolster an area of their team where they may not have the expertise.

That said, swerve is tough to pull off even if you start with pre-made transmissions. Cyber Blue is hosting a swerve discussion this week in Atlanta about the months they spent leading up to competition developing the technology.

The hard part is not the hardware. The devil is in the software. I admit, after 7 years of FRC and countless off season projects I am still intimidated by the thought of having to code a functional swerve drive during the build season.

Originally Posted by joek

but, most tank drives use only 2 drive motors, whereas omni and mechanum ALWAYS use 4, so there is pore power being delivered, despite the 30% decrease, we have mechanum, and were able to push around tank drives like it was notheing

What Tank Drive bots are you looking at? Ive seen some using 6 drive motors and most using 4.