Mecanum drive is a method of driving using specially designed wheels that allow the robot to drive in any direction without changing the orientation of the robot. A robot with a conventional drivetrain (all wheels pointing in the same direction) must turn in the direction it needs to drive. A mecanum robot can move in any direction without first turning and is called a holonomic drive.

Commands can be nested inside of command groups to create more complex commands. The simpler commands can be added to the command groups to either run sequentially (each command finishing before the next starts) or in parallel (the command is scheduled, and the next command is immediately scheduled also). Occasionally there are times where you want to make sure that two parallel command complete before moving onto the next command. This article describes how to do that.

This document describes how to rewrite a simple autonomous into a command based autonomous. Hopefully, going through this process will help those more familiar with the older simple autonomous method understand the command based method better. By re-writing it as a command based program, there are several benefits in terms of testing and reuse. For this example, all of the logic is abstracted out into functions primarily so that the focus of this example can be on the structure.

This article describes the basic format of a Command and walks through an example of creating a command to drive your robot with Joysticks.

For On/Off control of motors or other mechanisms such as solenoids, lights or other custom circuits, WPILib has built in support for relay outputs designed to interface to the Spike H-Bridge Relay from VEX Robotics. These devices utilize a 3-pin output (GND, forward, reverse) to independently control the state of two relays connected in an H-Bridge configuration. This allows the relay to provide power to the outputs in either polarity or turn both outputs on at the same time.