Mecanum or Swerve?

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by thefro526

I thought a bit more on this Subject last night, and came to the realization that Swerve Drives are going to become more and more common in FRC.

I would tend to disagree. Full mechanical designs for swerves (or the pictures to allow you to easily reverse engineer them) have been around for years. I believe 217 posted a cutaway of their serve from 5 or more years ago. Those teams are more than willing to lend help to anyone who needs it as well.

However, you still see a lot of teams who have already DONE swerve not using them going forward. Nearly every big name team has done swerve several times, yet most do not pick it as their drivetrain of choice.

Why?

1. Complexity. Both mechanical and programmatically.

2. Advantage gained. I would put forward that last year and this year are two of the biggest swerve-advantaged games so far. Yet if you look at the top tier of teams in OPR, the proportion of swerve teams comes no where near 50%. Swerve has a huge number of trade offs, and the advantages are actually questionable nearly every year. You'd have a hard time telling me that 67, 469, and 1114's lack of swerve this year is hurting them. I bet the choice not to do swerve HELPED them in a big way during the build season - it was that much more time to work on their ball handling systems.

3. Cost. Whether you purchase a turnkey system like the 221 one, or whether you build your own, there is no small cost in engineering, materials, and machining.

I keep pointing out and I will continue to point out that Swerve is cool, but most teams that build it realize they'd rather be spending their time solving the game rather than solving a drivetrain, and a 6-wheeled or 8-wheeled drivetrain will perform nearly as well in most applications, and better in many.