[sanddrag]

We've wanted to make one for probably a decade now, and still never have. We've been doing FIRST for 14 years now, we have mentors who have been doing it nearly as long, we have full in-house CNC manufacturing capabilities, machining mentors, a very well educated programming mentor from a highly-esteemed institution, and students with 3 full years experience behind them. We have the capability to build two identical robots ( and have done so twice) and access to a full size practice field.

We have downloaded and studied the CAD models of other teams' swerve drives and have twice begun modeling one of our own.

We still have not built a swerve and it's not likely that we will for 2015.

Why not? Years ago our team decided that we would never build a swerve drive during build season unless we'd previously done it during the offseason., and that never happened.

What is our reasoning for that decision? We've determined that the marginal performance gains in the drive system do not outweigh the additional time requirements to design, fabricate, refine, and program it. That time can be spent further developing and refining other parts of the robot.

And this is what frustrates me a little bit about the current state of COTS items. Years ago, teams could gain a significant advantage by heavily investing in the design, development, and manufacturing of these complex systems. Now, you're at a large disadvantage if you choose to do something custom over buying it. Why, you've lost time you literally could have bought. But buy buying it, you've lost the learning process. We're teaching students how to pick things out of a catalog (which is a great skill to have!) rather than teaching them to make the things that are in the catalogs (or better yet not in any catalogs). But, that's another discussion for another thread.

Part of our "problem" is that we doall the manufacturing in house. We can't spend 4 weeks on CAD, send it out to be laser cut and bent on a CNC press brake, and get a robot back in 3 days. We don't have that kind of sponsor like some teams do. If we don't have the mill running on day 2, we don't finish. And that's with a WCD.