Analyzing the Issues of Swerve Chassis

By Anuhya and Ren

Task: Analyze the future and current issues of continuing with a swerve chassis

After our analysis of the U League Tournament, our CAD and Build teams went further in detail of problems we have or will have in the future with swerve chassis.

• We currently have no idea how the swerve chassis will work and are replacing our proven, with lots of experience mecanum drive for an experiment
• The entire chassis is 100% unproven
• There are pretty slim chances of this chassis being able to compete and not self destructing, This is impossible by regionals and really slim past regionals
• We need to add a third swerve module that has to be built, but we likely do not have all the parts
• The head swerve builder/CADer has speciminer as a priority and speciminer requires a lot of work still
• Currently, trying to stop the swerve module with your hands causes it to slip and wear down. We still have not solved this issue and have only made them stall without the gears slipping
• it’s easy to stall the motors
• If we change the gear ratio, it will have more torque but that will cause it to slow down, something we cannot give up
• While robot will be lighter because it does not have double nacelles, it will only be driven by 2 (maybe 3) instead of 4, 2 motors cannot compete with 4 motors
• When arms are in the front, the omni wheel assembly will press into the ground and into the foam, it will act as a pivot and be impossible to strafe because of resistance
• It won't work if we need to travel sideways around the submersible, so adding a 3rd swerve to the front is almost a necessity

Making this list of swerve chassis problems has made us realize it is a very risky idea and placing all of our time into it may not be the best way to prepare for regionals. Nonetheless, we will continue to iterate swerve and continue trying to implement our swerve chassis into our robot.