My name is Kyle, and I am the newest lead mentor for the Bionic Tigers. I was a student on the team that recently came back to the team to help mentor. We developed a swerve drive that we used this past and I would like to share it here.
We had a few minor issues that have been adjusted with our newer design. But this should allow for a swerve drive that can be automatically calibrated with a magnet. We used a bag motor for rotation and a falcon 500 motor to drive. I believe the current gearing for the design is rated for 30 ft/s. Which was too fast for competition, so we ended up adjusting it down to 21ft/s by replacing the gears because we would fall over if we stopped too fast.
Let me know if you have any questions and I will try my best to help answer them. If this design helps your team out, I would be interested to hear how it worked out.
Yes there is a magnet embedded in one of the sides. Leave the magnet out of the other side or else it might be a little more difficult to program. We still drill the holes in case something goes wrong with a side.
Is there a reason you chose the older “bevel above wheel” swerve design instead of the “bevel beside wheel” design that’s more popular today?
Sorry for the super late delayed response, I was waiting for an answer from one of the mentors that helped with this build and got caught up in build season.
The reason is that with the design we were previously using, having that gear beside the gear would cause the wheel not to be centered with our design.
We also chose to design it like because we wanted to use gears that we use from vendors that we frequent. We didn’t want our COTS to be too custom that they have the chance of being sold out, so the gears are pretty generic.
Let me know if that answers your question and if not I can try to go into more detail. Hope that helps!
