SwerveLight (Lightweight swerve drives for FRC and combat robotics)

To put it bluntly, all development on this project has been temporarily paused for the last few months. While there are several reasons for this, the main reason is the deactivation of team 6635, the team that this swerve drive project was initially started by. While I am not going to reveal any of the drama of why the team shut down, I will say that members of this team ended up moving to two different teams in the area. Because of this transition, we felt that it was best for us to temporarily stop development of this system until things had settled down.

Things have finally settled down, and the main team members that had been leading the development of our swerve drive have all become members of team 7501. Because of this, we have finally resumed the development of our swerve drive. I recently posted a brand new design that we have been experimenting with. This design utilizes Swerve Drive Specialties X contact bearings and bevel gears, and the design is somewhat similar to the mk.2 module that they sell. The only difference is that it can be made by a team for around half of the price.

New swerve design

Grabcad model

3D printed swerve drive Mk.8

This is the next continuation of the 3D printed swerve drive system that I have been developing over the last few years. If you are familiar with this project, you may have noticed that it has been nearly a year since I released an update. This is because the team that I was working with decided ...

To be fully transparent with the new design, I must tell you all that we have not yet done much testing, and we have no intentions on using it in competition in the near future. While team 6635 had several members and mentors that have participated in first since 2010, team 7501 is still relatively inexperienced except for a few members that came from other teams. This past off season, we decided to focus mainly on an H-drive this off season because it seemed much more feasible for our team's age and resources. We have settled upon a solid H-drive design to use for our go-to maneuverable drive train until we eventually have our swerve drive perfected.

H-Drive design

Grabcad model

Team 7501 Off Season H-Drive

This is a model of team 7501's off season H-drive drivetrain. This robot was constructed out of 1" by 2" aluminum tubing and uses versaplanetary gearboxes for the drivetrain. Inventor files are in the .zip folder. We chose to use versaplanetary gearboxes because we wanted our robot to be as low p...