[GeeTwo]

If I understand correctly, you would essentially be making a gearbox which shifts between two outputs: One would power the wheel rotating against the floor, and the other output would control the orientation of the wheel. To make this work, you would still need a separate shifter control for each wheel to toggle between the states, so you would still need 2N controls where N is the number of wheels. You would also have an interesting time driving and steering simultaneously; you would have to switch back and forth for each steering maneuver. If you're simply after reducing the number of motors, it might make more sense to provide a (reversible) clutch from the drive shaft that can borrow a small fraction of the drive torque in order to steer. I still suspect that the extra complexity of the system would outweigh the reduction in motor count for most FRC purposes.