We are rookie team…this is our first season. Kids did fantastic! For the preseason practice robot, I am thinking of purchasing a tank chassis and have them do a swerve drive with a tank chassis…pros and cons please and any advise if this is a way to go.
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I’m a bit confused with your intended setup.
Do you mean you want to buy them the KOP chassis and convert to swerve?
If that is what you mean, I’d advise against it. There are better, and cheaper ways to make a swerve frame.
A lot of teams (mine included) are using 2x1 versaframe to hold swerve modules.
There are gussets available to make a square frame to mount most swerve modules. If you choose the SDS Mk4i, you just have to buy/cut the extrusion, and the modules hold everything together.
Now I will caution you: swerve drive is not a silver bullet, and the stuff on top of the chassis will make a bigger difference on the field than the chassis itself. Focusing on manipulators and CAD may prove to be a better use of time for most teams. Assuming your goal is to field the most competitive robot you can.
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Swerve drive is VERY difficult to do well. In fact, it’s VERY difficult to do at all. You will spend time fixing even the best built swerve modules and will spend months trying to figure out the code.
Are you sure that you aren’t better off, as a rookie, getting some of the other basic concepts of FIRST working? Like shooters, elevators, and climbers? You’ll spend a lot less time putting a quality differential drive / tank drive together and you’ll be able to focus on playing the game more than just getting your robot to move.
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While this is true, once you get one swerve bot working, you should be able to continue making them for every year after. So, it would be a sizeable investment of time/energy now, but it could pay off for years to come if done well. As previously mentioned, you would need to make sure you can build other major systems, since swerve alone cannot drive you to victory.
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Congrats on an awesome rookie season, and welcome to FIRST Minnesota! Had a fun time watching you play at Minneapolis.
As far as effort to reward ratio I’d say to invest and learn these concepts before swerve:
- Linear extension mechanism (climber or elevator)
- Pneumatics
- Deployable outside the frame intake
- More complex auto routines (3 ball, etc)
- Limelight vision tracking
To me, these concepts are more universally useful year to year and are simpler than swerve.
We’re thinking about crossing the swerve bridge ourselves and view it as a gamble. Do we really want to pour the resources into swerve if it turns out to be useless in next year’s game?
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We are an experienced team and are trying to get over the hurdle into swerve. Hopefully the second summer-of-swerve will get us where its a valid choice 
For a rookie team the only reason I would try swerve is if you got a $10k+ grant dropped in your lap AND your facilities are already in great shape (laser cutter, CNC router, drill press, chop saw, band saw, etc.). Otherwise I think you would be much better swerved by building up a KOP chassis set up as a 6" West Coast six wheel drive drop center. With that you get practice building a chassis AND the ability to set it up with various combinations of wheels (omni on front, traction all around, nothing in the middle, and others). That lets you drive and understand how the various arrangements TOTALLY change how it drives. AND that gives you a second bot to practice defense with!
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There’s a high chance of a bumpy field next year or something else that cripples swerve. That being said, having the knowledge of swerve is useful if there’s another swerve heavy game. Though I highly doubt swerve will ever have as much of an advantage as it does now.
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Thank you for the useful inputs. I am so grateful how awesome people are in this program. Every bit of your suggestions are valuable assets to me helping my kids. Greatly appreciated.
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Thank you for the advise, greatly appreciated.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the WPIlib includes a swerve module robot example. I believe all you have to do is plug in your drive and steer motor into an Swerve Module object and you have already done most of the work. I do agree in the past that it was difficult to implement swerve in code, but it looks like FIRST is trying to make it easier for others to implement.
My team used this for our DiffSwerve even. Obviously we had to make some changes but we started with the base framework given in the WPIlib.
I will agree it is still difficult to wrap your head around and figure out how to use the libs and other things, but I disagree the with “VERY” in your original statement.
Here is an example of some of the stuff WPIlib has to make Swerve easier in the coming years. Kinematics and Odometry — FIRST Robotics Competition documentation
Thank you for the support. Those five bullet points are our main targets for the off season practices. It is good to know that we are heading in the right direction. I am open to any useful suggestions that will continue to help my kids.
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Thank you very much for your advise. greatly appreciated. Great suggestions. we were already heading in those directions with manipulators. Awesome to know that we are heading in the right direction.
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