Chainless drive system?

[sithmonkey13]

We have been working on several possible drive systems for our robots (both FIRST and on our own) and we have hit a question. We would like to have the possibility of mounting the gearbox and motor directly to the axle (avoiding using a drive chain, which we seem to always have a problem with.) Our lead mechanical guy asked, "How do you mount the bearings? Normally they are the wheel to allow it to spin around the axle, so would you mount them to the axle or what?" This question has been bugging us, and we view it as the step to maybe going to more advanced drive systems (such as swerve, mecanum or holonomic instead of 2 or 4 motor drive (with one gearbox per side of the robot) and chains going to the wheels.))