pic: Offseason independent swerve design concept chassis

[CENTURION]

Originally Posted by Jay Burnett

Well..... yes and no. If we decide to use swerve next season this could conceivably work as our drive train. Could you clarify what you mean when you say it wouldn't be useful because of sheet metal across the middle? Any feedback would be welcomed, so I can tweak and improve my design.

What I'm saying is that your swerve modules look pretty good, and would be a good design to use on a competition robot, but the frame you've designed here is pretty impractical for a competition robot.

The sheet metal I'm talking about is your "X" shaped brace right in the middle of the bot. Having that brace there means that you're limiting where you can place other robot components. What if you wanted a floor pickup mechanism of some sort? You've "filled" that space with framing.

If you study successful FRC frame designs, you'll find that the area in the middle of the frame is generally left open, and instead, support for things like swerve modules is created through structural members around the sides of the bot (Hint: That's also where the bumpers go, and it's a good bet you want strong framing behind your bumpers )

If you're designing a drivetrain before you know what the game is (And therefore what mechanisms you need, and where those mechanisms will fit on the robot) you want to leave your options open, you want a frame that could be adapted to any number of mechanisms.

Wherever you have framing, you can't have mechanisms (at least in general) I can't think of many mechanisms that make use of the edges of the robot, but I can think of a thousand that make use of the very center of the robot.