potential future white paper: swerve drive implementation

[PAR_WIG1350]

Originally Posted by virtuald

Swerve Drive is really easy to implement if you ignore the actual control of the motors and just look at it abstractly (ie.. point motor to angle and run it at some speed). Of course, there are some optimizations you can do to ensure smoother operation past just the pure mathematical analysis.

I created a spreadsheet to simulate a swerve drive and its calculations (by using a graph to model the direction/speed of the wheels): http://www.virtualroadside.com/blog/...l-spreadsheet/

We also released the source code for our robot that year (which includes its swerve drive code), which can also be found elsewhere on my website.

Yes, but not really, for people who breeze through vector calculus like it was nothing, swerve drive is nothing (and this is swerve drive, not crab which is really easy to program), but some teams don't have any team members with higher level math skills. The idea of this paper is to provide an out of the box formula for any swerve drive base regardless of size, shape, or number of wheels. Also, it doesn't involve any calculus at all. in addition, mechanical and electrical implementation of swerve will also be discussed. Currently the paper is not very much more than a plan, but the idea of using tables and arrays for swerve drive is one of the planned topics of discussion, although how to do it is not.