Sustainability - 2014 - COTS parts

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Ben Martin

Is selling COTS subsystems outright, like a COTS shooter or COTS hanger, really the way we want to go, though? If we look at 2011, a COTS minibot? We already have COTS drives and COTS transmissions, which certainly have dramatically increased the performance level of many teams. A LOT of integration still certainly has to be done. At what point do the individual components become so few teams lose the 'fun' of designing and building it themselves? I'm not sure.

I think this is a non-issue; I'd expect that FIRST would not condone FRC suppliers selling what essentially constitutes ready-made entire robots, and could trivially put an end to it by simply not giving them any information on the game prior to kickoff. To this end, I doubt we'll ever see COTS mechanisms that deal with year-specific game tasks.