Mecanum or Swerve?

[ALTrammell818]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

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.

Have you not seen the number of Mecanum drive bots this year with unbelievable pushing power? Back in Detroit the only bot with more push than us was the Juggernauts.