pic: Team 2220's Swerve Drive Chasis

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

My "ideal" swerve would have a field centric "point the modules this way" stick and a robot centric everything else... I think.

My ideal swerve would have field-centric Halo-style interface with a pushbutton to align the bot in the direction of motion a la item #4 of this post.

[indubitably]

Originally Posted by Ether

My ideal swerve would have field-centric Halo-style interface with a pushbutton to align the bot in the direction of motion a la item #4 of this post.

We had this last year as well and ended up switching back to a robot centric control because it was easier to drive directly toward the ball collector that way.

[gren737]

Originally Posted by JVN

Hey,
Good start! Just a friendly word of warning: a swerve drive takes a LOT of effort to get right, especially on the first try. You WILL spend most of the season fighting this design to get it running right, and to keep it running right. You'll spend so much time fighting with it, your driver won't get to use any of the advantages a swerve drive would provide... I promise you this.

I BEG you to not try to use this design without building it in the pre-season and testing it. If you're putting lots of resources (effort) into your drivetrain you're not going to have as much effort available for your mechanism -- the mechanism is where the magic is, and what makes you successful on the field.

Build a simple, reliable, drivetrain, and spend your engineering on the rest of your robot. You'll be much happier. If the summer comes along and you still want to build a swerve drive, try it then.

If you don't have the resources to prototype it in the summer, you might not want to be attempting it anyways. Again, we all have limited resources during the build season -- spend the ones you have on things that will have the biggest payoff...

$0.02
-John

^^^ Take it from another mentor this is very good advice! ^^^

[Jedward45]

Originally Posted by gren737

^^^ Take it from another mentor this is very good advice! ^^^

Indeed, but I disagree with the idea that the manipulator is where the magic is. Our team has had bad experiences with an immobile tank drive and a subsequently useless manipulator. Furthermore, the manipulator becomes obsolete after a year. The development of a swerve drive can out your entire team on another tier. But only time will tell!

[Gdeaver]

Swerve or six wheel drive? That is the question that our team battled tonight. Swerve won. I notified my wife tonight that she may not see me much for the next 6 weeks. This is going to be a very stressful and crazy build. If we pull off our design goals we will have one awesome robot. If we fail we will fail horribly. The programmers have go fever. We'll see how the are in week six and seven and eight...

[jethrow]

swerve drive is harder then you think do not rely on chains.

[Racer26]

1075 did a 2+2 swerve configuration for the last two years (for the 2010 FRC season we designed and built DSSwerve, AFAIK to date the ONLY FRC bot with invertable swerve drive)

Swerve is hard to do well. Our 2010 incarnation of swerve worked fairly well, but we had a driver with 4 years of FRC experience, and our 2010 DSSwerve was derived from our 2009 Swerve.

2010 DSSwerve suffered from throwing chains, bending swerve modules via side-loading when being pushed, and more. The worst part about building a swerve system is that the mechanical complexity of the system makes repairing failed parts significantly more difficult, and can often result in needing to disassemble large portions of the robot, depending on which part has failed.