[Alex.Norton]

I would say that something like this could have its advantages. The problem of making a specific swerve module does present itself, this is a little too specific to really sell for a first competition. However, I could easily see AM selling a generalized turret module because whenever I would thing of making a turret, or swerve this was always the area that I got hung up on.

Don't get me wrong, i'm never a fan of standardizing any piece of the robot. I always built a custom frame when I was a student on a team, this was one major reason that I was never a fan of the kit bot. I was always disappointed when I walked into a team pit to find that they had used the kit frame cause I didn't get to see anything new.

But to see the other side of the argument, I've been working on computer vision and specifically motion tracking on a mobile platform. The overall idea of the algorithms behind this task (ie. optical flow, image segmentation) are well within my grasp as a sophomore in college. However, I could never apply the linear algebra or the mechanics of the algorithms behind these, which is why I turn to libraries like Opencv which has the mechanics already finished for me. Yes I could learn a lot from writing my own mean shift segmentation on an image, but if I use the library I can write some very cool code much faster. In the same way, if AM offered a swerve module a team could get a working robot much faster and perhaps be able to implement some very cool control algorithms.