Crab/Swerve Drive Module Attachment Point

[skimoose]

Team 228 should be posting their SolidWorks model very soon for this year's robot. Our mounting was to capture the swerve module surfaces between two 0.25" Delrin bearing plates mounted to the robot frame. It took quite a few man hours to get the bearing plates to run flawlessly, but it was worth it. This connection system worked very well for us this season with no failures.

The bearing surfaces had quite a large OD in anticipation of the cantilevered stress from climbing the bumps and playing heavy defense. On a flat playing field we'd probably go with a much smaller bearing surface.

We did not do full concentric swerve. There are measurable efficiency losses in using bevel gears which we didn't feel were offset by the ability to spin a drive pods continuously. Our swerve pods were fully independent allowing us to rotate while driving in a straight line (there's a white paper here on CD covering independent twisting swerve).

We used a three axis joystick and gyros for field-centric control. The third axis (joystick twist) allowed for the rotate while driving in any direction.

The swerve system had a pretty steep learning curve for us. I would definitely recommend prototyping during the off-season to avoid some of the stress that we encountered.