Swerve is the Future and that's Intentional

Competition FRC Game Design
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Enter speculation land with me.

Some things I have heard this year (quotes are approximate and not necessarily literal quotes):

  • “FIRST didn’t expect swerve to take off like this”

  • “Next year will be stronghold 2.0”

  • “Next year will be a terrain game”

  • “Next year will be deliberately designed to kill swerve”

(We proceed, ignoring all potential discuss about how far in advance FIRST designs the games, how much they try to curb design trends, and any other form of common sense.)

Now I will place my bet. Next year’s field will be similarly open to this years, perhaps even more so.

Here’s my crack theory:

FIRST welcomes, nay, urns for our new swerve overlords.

Why? It’s simple: Swerve is more fun to watch. It performs better, it moves faster, it’s more fluid, strafing takes far less time, and it makes robots look more competent.

FIRST’s master plan is finally coming to fruition. In 2019 they added brushless motors, laying the groundwork for what was to come. Next SDS, Rev, and WCP all released COTS swerve modules (coincidence? I think not). Finally, FIRST sweat talked REV into making the PDH with 20 whole slots, allowing teams to use 8 motor drive trains and still have plenty of breakers to spare for other mechanisms.

Back to being slightly more serious.

I don’t think swerve is ready yet, but I do wonder if some day it will be easy and cheap enough for any team to use. Maybe there will even be a swerve kit bot.

If swerve were to become easy enough and as ubiquitous as tank drive is, I do think it would make FRC more fun to watch. Being able to strafe saves so much time lining up and makes the robot look a lot more fluid. I think having universally accessibly swerve would “raise the skill floor” so to speak.

I do realize that, thus far, it’s mostly the higher performing, higher resourced teams that have adopted swerve. That certainly makes swerve appear better, but I think that swerve is an objectively better drivetrain than tank in most cases… or could be if it was easy enough to pull off.

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I think the cause and effect of why swerve is now more recently so popular / easy is summed up well by Corsetto, and I think it’s a conspiracy theory to think that this was some master plan by FIRST.

I agree it makes the games much more interesting. Especially when defense was a thing in 2022 (versus 2023’s lack of defense), seeing a good swerve defense is actually way more exciting that a tank drive getting T-boned.

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I’ve heard this thrown around a bunch and my counter point is always:

The games will always be designed such that the kop drivetrain can reasonably play them. And cots swerve drives can basically do everything the kop drive can and more.

Hampering swerve through game design isn’t all that feasible. Besides straight up limiting actual drivetrain type/design.

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I definitely believe the games are designed to be able to use KOP effectively. in 2010 a KOP could go thru the middle channels (Don’t remember the name). 2012 KOP could go over the ramps but if you can design to go over the bumps it will make you faster. 2016 you can go thru the low bar, portcullis, cheval de frise, drawbridge, and Sally port. With a bit more engineering it doesn’t take much for a swerve or tank to defeat the other defenses (16 bomb squad did this well).

Honestly I hope we do see a field with a few challenges at some point. Something that will give a few more challenges to drivetrain design but only if the team wants to tackle them. Maybe not ideal next year since swerve is still at a point where teams with less resources are acquiring them and practicing. It is hard to put that much money into a project and then not use it.

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BRING IT!

The other mentors and I were excitedly discussing the possibility of SWANK 2.0 before kickoff this year. Didn’t happen this year, but someday it will.

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For what it’s worth, I’ve heard rumors through the grape vine that the 2024 KoP chassis could have some fairly significant changes to it… so who knows? :thinking:

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I’ve been thinking that the compliance of those TPU tires would help with bumps and obstacles as well.

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You mean the announcement on the blog about this KoP being tuned up for the game?
“As an alternative, we worked with a member of the community to design a base robot specific to CRESCENDO that will be included in the 2024 Kit of Parts.”

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I was also aware of that too, but this sounded more like the KoP chassis specifically, to me at least.
I suppose it’s entirely possible the rumor I heard was just referring to the announcement, but at the very least that was not the impression I got.

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I think that you’re over thinking it a bit. The PDH from Rev was addressing a need that had nothing to do with swerve. We approached 18 motors on non-swerve platforms. We needed more slots, even if you ignore swerve.

FIRST didn’t have any great desire to allow brushless motors into FRC. In fact, they’d been proposed multiple times by vendors before they were finally allowed in.

SDS released their swerve module. They took the risk and found out that teams were willing to pay a huge amount of money ($1600 per robot) for a well made drivetrain solution. Thrifty, WCP, then REV all followed well after the fact because they saw the opportunity for profit.

Swerve has become quite easy. I’ll give you an example. We switched to JAVA, and are learning how to use it before the season. It took a total of 15 minutes using the Phoenix Pro software and their pre-made swerve libraries to get one up and moving.

I’d never suggest a rookie team try swerve. Just being a rookie is pretty darn hard. But second year teams, if they plan ahead? Yup.

The ubiquitous argument really comes down to funding. Teams that have the funding will go swerve if they want to be competitive. But there is really not a barrier to entry anymore, other than finances. If you have even partially competent programmers and mech, swerve is attainable based on the premade components and premade code bases.

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I don’t disagree. There isn’t too much in that post you should take seriously.
(I hope my humour came across. If I had left the refernce to Dormammu in it may have been more obvious I was having a laugh).

Interesting bit of history. I did not know that.

Absolutely, but I had fun implying they were all somehow in kahoots with FIRST.

What about in 10 years? Do you think there could be a swerve kitbot in the next decade?

For sure, I wonder how much cheaper swerve modules can feasibly get. Down to $200 each? $150? Not sure how that compares to the current kitbot.

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I hear a lot of “we need to save tank drive!” and i’m just like, why? swerve is pretty much superior to tank in most ways so why limit robots by trying to keep tank alive?

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Well, cost for starters.

But that’s part of a broader discussion on what should FRC cost (and maybe even who shouldn’t do FRC versus other programs).

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Someone say conspiracy? I blame @marshall.

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The Thrifty Swerve got it down to 200$ per module. That means 4 modules would cost about the same as a KoP drivetrain.

Just sayin.

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That’s exactly what big FRC would want us to think!

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Too easy. You could blame Marshall for almost anything around here.

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At that price point you don’t make much of a profit though. Learned a lot from that whole experience.

The modules on the market today are honestly a good deal for what you get vs how they’re priced. Most teams would be hard pressed to make modules that cost less and when you factor in the time you save it’s a no brainer.

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Can confirm. We CAD’d out our own design and it priced out not much below COTS offerings. In year 1. Add on the fact that you have to replace the machined parts every year and by year 3, COTS was less. Further you have to disassemble and after kickoff reassemble each year, taking valuable build season time, we came to the conclusion that unless you had a design that was somehow leaps and bounds above any COTS offering, D-I-Y no longer makes any sense.

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Even when you 3D print and cnc everything you can (built @Nick_Coussens wonderful series), its still expensive!

Hey, heres two insane ideas!

Somebody dreams up a 3 phase rotary transformer that allows you to have a wheel motor swerve!

Find a three phase slip ring (or just keep track of wire twist) and do a wheel motor.

The hard bit there is you want a lower speed, high torque motor, maybe an outrunner.

Plus, youd kinda want sensorless :wink:

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