Driving a robot using Mecanum drive
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.
Conventions and Defaults
For information on conventions and defaults of the MecanumDrive class, see the WPILib Drive classes: Conventions and Defaults article.
Mecanum wheels

The wheels shown in this robot have rollers that cause the forces from driving to be applied at a 45 degree angle rather than straight forward as in the case of a conventional drive. You might guess that varying the speed of the wheels results in travel in any direction. You can look up how mecanum wheels work on various web sites on the internet.
Controlling Mecanum: Cartesian vs Polar
The MecanumDrive class contains two ways of controlling the drivetrain:
- Cartesian: This method takes X, Y, and Rotation parameters and is commonly used when mapping joysticks to mecanum drive movement. The resulting robot translation is a combination of the desired X and Y movement.
- Polar: This method takes Magnitude, Angle, and Rotation parameters and is commonly used when controlling the robot autonomously. The angle should be specified in degrees around the Z-axis (between -180 and 180).
Code for teleop driving with mecanum wheels
Here's a sample program that shows the minimum code to drive using a single joystick and mecanum wheels. The joystick XY position represents a robot-relative direction vector that the robot should follow. The twist (Z) axis on the joystick represents the rate of rotation for the robot while it's driving.
Updating the program for field-oriented driving
There is also an optional 4th parameter to the MecanumDrive_Cartesian() method that is the angle returned from a Gyro sensor. This will adjust the X/Y values supplied, in this case, from the joystick to be relative to the field rather than relative to the robot. This is particularly useful with mecanum drive since, for the purposes of steering, the robot really has no front, back or sides. It can go in any direction. Adding the angle in degrees from a gyro object will cause the robot to move away from the drivers when the joystick is pushed forwards, and towards the drivers when it is pulled towards them - regardless of what direction the robot is facing!
The use of field-oriented driving makes often makes the robot much easier to drive, especially compared to a "robot-oriented" drive system where the controls are reversed when the robot is facing the drivers.
Just remember to get the gyro angle each time MecanumDrive_Cartesian() is called.
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