For Team's Trying Mecanum Drive

[sasha831]

I have seen a heap of posts by teams who are planning on or considering trying Mecanum drive, asking for advice and help. Last year, our team developed a Java Library for Mecanum Drive as we were not satisfied with the stock code provided by WPI. The library has an optional field oriented drive function and can be found here:

http://ai-robotics.com.au/code-libraries/

It is freely available to all FIRST teams. For any help, you can PM me, or use the email address provided on the page. Happy Coding!

[Ether]

Originally Posted by sasha831

we were not satisfied with the stock code provided by WPI

What aspect of the WPILib code was not satisfactory for your team?

[sasha831]

We found that, at least for us, it was not a plug and play solution, and took us quite a while to get anything working, and when we finally did get it working, it was far from perfect - while creating the library was more work then getting the stock code working, there is now an easy plug and play solution for future years

[Ether]

Originally Posted by sasha831

We found that, at least for us, it was not a plug and play solution, and took us quite a while to get anything working, and when we finally did get it working, it was far from perfect

It would be helpful and enlightening if you could be more specific. For example, are you claiming that the imperfect operation of your bot was caused by incorrect inverse kinematic computation in WPILib?

[sasha831]

I'm sure the WPI libs have the correct kinematic calculations happening, it's just that it took us a few entire days to get them working - we had a lot of general library/compatibility issues which I couldn't name specifically now, and when we did get them working, the drive was a little wonky, curving slightly to one side and a few minor inconveniences similar to that.

In addition, the library we created gives the user a much more custom control over the robot, with functions simplify not only driving, but collecting the necessary input for mecanum from joysticks, or gyros for a FOD system

At the end of the day our library is just an extra resource for teams using mecanum, that could end up simplifying their lives