In this tutorial you are going to learn to program the SwerveBot. This robot is significantly more sophisticated than the robot you programmed in the Minibot tutorial. This robot incorporates a swerve drive mechanism instead of the tank drive of the Minibot. The swerve drive consists of four independent wheels each of which can be rotated to any angle through an entire 360 degree range. This allows the robot to drive in any direction unlike the Minibot which must turn to the direction you wish to travel.
The ultimate goal is to program the robot to perform actions autonomously such as:
This tutorial will be a bit different than the Minbot tutorial in that we will not be supplying you with the code. You will need to write it yourself. What we will do, however, is walk you through doing that. If you don’t remember how to create a new project you can review that procedure from the Minibot tutorial here.
This new robot will require three subsystems:
The next chapters will walk you through creating each of these subsystems.