Mecanum or Swerve?

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

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.

What is of most interest to me:

217: Swerved in 2003. Hasn't done it again. (Nonadrive is the closest they've come)
67: Swerved in 2005. Hasn't gone back. (This was a cool flop bot swerve though)
1114: Swerved in 2004. Hasn't gone back.
33: Swerved in 2005, switched to different drive train halfway through the season. Again in 2009: Maybe?
71: has been using swerve since 2005. (Of particular interest: Hasn't won a Championship since 2004)
111: even I don't know how long.
68: 2008,2009,2010. This year their swerve drive was too much of a technical undertaking for them.
148: Swerved in 2008. Hasn't gone back since.

So many veteran teams have tried swerve and gone back to traditional 6wd/8wd machines. 2009 was not a FULL swerve, only 2 wheels actuated as far as I can recall.

67, 6wd the last couple years. 8wd this year.
1114, 6wd. 8wd this year
33, 6wd.
217, 6wd (excepting this year)

I know correlation does not imply causation but I have a hunch that there is a reason why none of these teams have gone swerving again. It may be a cool thing, and definitely a design every team should have in their arsenal, but in most cases it is not the most efficient design.