[Foster]

I'm all for AM to sell the swerve/crab/snake drive kits. I don't think that the basic kit would fall into the "COTS for FIRST only" there are lots of other roboteers that buy stuff from AM.

A few posters pointed out that the hard parts are not the swerve drive but the mounting onto the robot and the control system, and I agree. I don't see anything wrong with buying a part to make some robot assembly go faster. It's how its done in the "real world", COTS over custom, COTS wins a lot of the time.

When we first started out we traveled to Canada each summer to hand dig 50 tons of aluminum ore and 100 tons of coal. Our grant from Alcoa gave us access to their smelters. We turned our coal into electricity and used it to smelt our ore into a thousand pound aluminum billet. We then machined the billet into the parts we needed for the robot. With a small team this left little time to do detailed design or control systems.

Since then we've relied on suppliers like AM and McMaster. This has freed up lots of roboteer time to work on design, assembly and control systems. And it's paid off, our robot this year did not need any major repairs in the pits and we won an award for our design and control system.

We did look at swerve drives for this year and instead built our 6+1=3 drive that worked very well. But it would be nice to have a swerve drive option that we could bolt into place and spend the more important time of integrating it into the system.