Opinion Poll: Proliferation of Prefbricated Parts

[Ekcrbe]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

No - COTS won't stop anyone from teaching shop skills if they want to teach them and if the students want to learn them.

However if your shop skills education is only being supported because you can't get everything you need for FIRST without it - then eventually COTS on the scale of whole professionally engineered systems and robots will make that not necessary and support for those shops will be lost.

We are not at that point but when we get there (notice I didn't write -if- we get there) it is very likely we will level out more than the dynamics of the field.

The day a team decides not to fight the closing of their shop because "well, we can get everything we need from COTS components anyway," I'll eat my robot.

As I have argued earlier, the teams that already have decent shop capabilities aren't reducing the amount of custom design and building they have to do by replacing it with COTS, they're maintaining the same level of custom work, shifting that energy to other non-COTS mechanisms and using COTS parts to free up the time to complete them. I fundamentally disagree that COTS parts will ever get to a point where a team could be compelled to buy a kit and not do anything to it before taking it to competition.

The only teams that would be noticeably decreasing the amount of work they do themselves are the teams that could make a robot to effectively complete every objective in the game with no COTS parts at all. Those aren't the teams we need to be worried about.