I wish a team could buy one of these wheel and padels, to replace the regular controller.
Programming and execution should be a fun and productive challenge for a pre-existing swerve (you could even go further and add planty of car inspired features to the driving experience)
I would really like to see a team buy the analog car controls and make this happen.
This falls apart when you consider the steering wheel and 3 pedals are because of Ackermann steering and a user-operated multi-speed transmission…
How does it fall apart, the idea is to program the wheel turning to imitate Ackermann steering. And to ignore transmission.
Ackerman steering cannot go sideways.
The whole point of swerve drive is to go sideways.
If you’re really really careful, you can find non-articulated vehicles with rear steering… which still can’t go sideways even with the second Ackerman.
One final note: It’s been close to 15 years since I’m aware of anybody trying Ackerman steering in FRC… and that was 2008, a game modeled on auto racing. For FRC, it just ain’t worth it… and if you’re using a swerve to drive Ackerman style, you’re underutilizing the swerve something awful.
I’m not going to say you can’t try it. I’m just saying that it most likely won’t win you anything at all, except maybe a few “WTF???” comments on scouting report.
Well, my point wasn’t to use it to win anything. Obviously it would be something just for the fun of driving the robot with a wheel and throttle, and for the challenge. Like the people who made sphere wheel drive.
If a team wants to buy the controller, spend an hour making it all work so they can play with it, show it off, or use it as an educational challenge, I say why not.
Birth of budget swerve, max turning angle 45 degrees
Bomb Squad use to use a steering wheel and a joystick for their swerve drive a ways back.
be sure to put a chair on top of the drivebase and take it onto the highway
I think we’re just left wondering why you want this for a swerve drive specifically. Is it just to mimic the front wheels turning like a car?
I know 971 has used a wheel and throttle in the past (offhand, I know I spotted it in their 2016 reveal video). The control scheme seems much more suited to a tank drive to me.
I too would love to see this! In 2020 we programmed in a backup if we lost both gyros and had no ability to drive field centric.
Here is our 2016-2019 driver (who only ever had tank drive) driving our 2020 swerve robot like tank. The front modules rotate to give direction instead of just skid steering, and if I remember correctly there was a pseudo-Ackerman done in software. If we were to rotate in place though it would just do the same as a typical swerve though.
Just thought this was cool
For the memes I wrote manual swerve code which is ackerman steering and you have to shift up and down. max speed and accel are limited too depending on the gear ur in so u have to actually shift to get to speed and you want to make sure you downshift too
pain
I’ve heard of a team that “ran” (in quotes because the robot didn’t move) Ackerman in 2009.
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