Beaver Island has a great tradition called the boodle, which is a leisurely drive around our island with stops to hike, enjoy the view or dance a jig. This evening our team added swerving to that list as we successfully tested our swerve drive system for the first time on our 2023 robot. We’ve been trying to get it running for several weeks and have battled through hardware, wiring and software issues. But we finally have it working.
Implementing a swerve drive system for the first time in the history of our team was a key goal for 2023. We think the maneuverability it allows will be very useful in this year’s game. We’ve used a mecanum drive system in the past for similar maneuverability, but we didn’t believe mecanum would have the traction needed to work on the Charge Platform in this year’s game. Given the complexity of swerve drive, we knew that implementing it and a self balancing system might be all we could do with our limited resources, but we seem on track to also implement a innovative design for handling the game pieces for the game as well. More on that in a later post. For now, check out this historic video of the first time a swerve drive system has every operated on Beaver Island.
