Me and my team are wondering if it is possible to 3d print parts for a swerve drive to cut down on cost. i have looked at rev robotics 3in swerve and have it’s cad files. if we bought the parts that have screw thread and 3 printed gears would they be strong enough to withstand forces being sent through them.
3D print gears in a swerve drive? The answer to that is, unless you’re REALLY good at printing, NO^NO.
Yes, people have done it. But in general, for FRC, I wouldn’t recommend 3D printing gears unless they were being used in a very light-duty application. Swerve… is not a light-duty application.
I’d take a look around the forum, there’s a team or two that have 3D printed a full swerve drive. Edit your title so it asks about 3D printing swerve drives and that should catch their attention.
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A fully 3d printed swerve is possible. That being said, if your team is concerned about having the financial resources to purchase COTS swerve it’s likely a better investment to stick to the kit of parts drivetrain and focus on putting resources towards the mechanisms on it. Swerve definitely isn’t a silver bullet to being competitive and making reliable and effective mechanisms will net you much more performance than a more agile drivetrain.
Here’s one example of 3d printed swerve: Release of compact, 3d printed swerve drive from frc team 3737
Have you started using swerve before? If this is the first time you’ve used it (as in, right now the team is starting to consider it) then this is not the right year to try it, 3D printed or otherwise.
I really don’t think this is a good idea. The gears in that gearbox are subject to some pretty significant forces. Additionally, plastic gears in this application are going to wear quickly. In my opinion at least, this isn’t a suitable application for a plastic 3D printed part. The risk is awfully high too - if any of the gears in any of your swerve modules fails during a match, you’re immobilized.
This isn’t something to pinch pennies on. There are other parts of a robot to save money on with 3D printing, but not these gears. It’d be fun to print the whole thing as a demonstrator model, but not for actual use.
3d printing needs to be in mind from the get go if it is going to be a major component of swerve. You can’t just print out a COTS module for robot use. Bevel gears on the swerve modules are a no-go (but steel there is not a problem, that is SUPER low weight)
As far as gears in general go: you can get away with a lot more than you may think, at least with Onyx and its contemporaries. Large tooth profiles / as large of pitch diameter as possible, Face width, dowel pins… The list goes on.
that is a fair point, I am still attempting to learn about swerve drives and the strengths that parts need to operate. also probably above our pay grade because we struggling to the kit bot somehow. idk how we have messed up this much.
Cut yourselves some slack. This stuff is complicated. No one who is currently good at it started out that way. It doesn’t sound like you’ve screwed up, it just sounds like you’re in the process of figuring things out. I’m an adult mentor and I didn’t get my head wrapped around the mechanics of a serve module until we took ours apart this week to flip the motors over. Maybe 3D printing one as a learning tool is a good idea.
My understanding is that swerve takes a decent amount of team experience and programming depth to implement. Walk before your run. Don’t try to figure everything out all at once.
Good luck to you and your team!
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If you are first considering the way your swerve drive should be manufactured at this point in the build season, it’s too late to do it.
I would instead build your team’s first swerve later on, as an offseason project, when there is no time pressure or competitive pressure. For now, focus on adding capabilities to your team’s kitbot to allow it to score better and complete more game objectives. This is not a game where swerve is mandatory, honestly.
Hi, 3737 is one of the teams that have published a 3D printed swerve dive (link shown above). Permit me to respond to some of the comments above. Obviously these are just my opinions and experiences. We have used 3D printed swerve drives for 2 years during competitions and off season (including a 3 day STEM event where we played almost every other match for the whole time). There is only one gear that is a candidate for 3D printing - the turntable (azimuth) which has 94 teeth. Every other gear needs to be strong aluminum or steel. We actually started with a Nylon printed 94T gear and decided to try PETG as a test. After a few competitions, we disassembled a unit and inspected the gear. It was dust free, the grease was still transparent red and we saw no signs of wear under an 8x magnifying glass. Our unique, fully enclosed casing design makes it very strong. We have almost finished printing a new set to go on our current competition robot.
I would echo the comments about not using swerve if you have not already got a design and the code for it all working.
There’s plenty of time left in the season. You definitely haven’t messed up too bad if you’re asking questions on ChiefDelphi.
Focus on building a simple bot that can complete some of the game’s tasks, and then practice driving it around as much as you can. You drivetrain doesn’t score you any points.
My team’s rookie season in 2017, I believe we signed up after the deadline (the teacher told me we got special permission), and we spent the first week of the season cleaning our workspace. We were alliance captains at our regional because we scored 3 game pieces and climbed every match. At our regional was team 5499. If I remember the award ceremony correctly, they had no access to a work space for the first three weeks of the season (and that was when you had to bag your robot after six weeks). They won the Idaho Regional and the World Championship that year with a really simple and robust design (tank drive btw). Don’t look at the top teams and feel like you are falling behind.
Check out the Everybot. Your team can definitely build that, even if you don’t have a lot of money. Build it, drive it around, and figure out ways to improve it. Don’t worry about swerve.
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So, I’d actually like to encourage you and your teammates to 3D print a swerve module.
Not for use on your robot this year, but to use as a tool to understand how the modules operate, the types of stresses and wear various parts get through experimental use, and possibly even to generate ideas on how else swerve modules can be used besides driving.
When it comes down to it, a swerve module behaves like a turret. The same concepts can be applied to a turret/shooter system when scaled, and printing the gears and other components that makes this layout possible is a great visual aid for future robot concepts.
I actually designed and 3D printed my own “swerve modules” to serve as a teaching aid to my students before we ever attempted to buy them for our robot.
I’m thinking that a 3d printed swerve module is probably do-able, but I would not start with CAD from a metal one. It would have to be carefully designed to make sure the gears and shafts have less stress…wide face-widths for the gear teeth, large diameters for the shafts. printed only with CF-20 polyester–which is finicky.
We played 2019 with ‘motor in the wheel’ modules that had a printed ring gear and we never broke or wore-out a gear in two regionals.
It was a fun design, but we didn’t steer it well…driver never knew where the robot would go. we did really badly.
original prototypes were completely 3-d printed, but heat was bad to them.
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