If I remember correctly 4920 had a swerve for the first event of their 2016 season and then later in the season replaced it with a kitbot drive train. If that’s not a good example of abandoning a swerve drive I don’t know what is.
It’s kind of interesting how rare swerve is in Ontario. Their were some notable swerve’s early on (1114’s rookie year) but it’s pretty much died out since then. Most areas have a perennial “swerve team” (1323/1717 in Cali, 1640 in MAR, 2767 in FIM, 16/2451/2481 in the midwest) but Ontario has been pretty lacking, particularly in the last 5 years. This could be seen as a good or bad thing, potentially a win for strategic aptitude of the average Ontario team but it also makes me sad how some students may never be exposed to this unique drive train style at competition.
With the more recent advent of things like the Talon SRX, 775 pro and the mag encoder I honestly believe that there is some reasonable competitive merit to becoming a “swerve team” assuming you develop and practice for it in the offseason and use it every year. FIRST seems to be trending towards games without the need for two speed drive train. I could imagine that being able to easily adjust the dimensions of your drive base could come in really handy strategically at the start of the season.
The Talon SRX just makes it so much easier to make and tune robust closed loop mechanisms. Over the past couple of years I’ve actually had more luck with motorized closed loop mechanisms than I’ve had with pneumatic ones. Teams like 4678 in 2016 have been building multi jointed arms to great effect that actually end up simpler than the traditional more mechanical solutions
If someone like WCP were to come out with a robust integrated swerve module I could actually see it become fairly prominent in FRC among high resource teams.
:yikes: LOL