Recent Kit Base Performance

[Bkeeneykid]

Many of our very successful robots have been built on a stock drive chassis. It seems as our team gets older, the students and mentors who both have the desire and capabilities to create a custom drive chassis gets fewer and fewer. It always depends on the game, but this year, we knew right away we would have to spend time creating a VERY robust drive train, something none of our few members had any experience with. Both our 2014 and 2016 robots are built upon the newer AM14U chassis, and we've had great experiences with both of those. We modified our AM14U3 to have an indent in the front for the Rock Wall and a ball opening, and we spent considerably less time cutting these on the porta-band than we would have spent on our own. In light of not being able to get AndyMark pneumatic wheels, we adapted their hubs to our own wheels, with moderate success. Frankly, for low resource teams such as mine, I think time saved on the kit chassis is worth more than creating any of your own.

I'm not the only one with this opinion, as I talked to the other teams in my school district about this at Maker Faire KC (2335, 1984). 1984 used a VersaFrame bot, and had troubles with it throughout the entire day. They still said they preferred it, but they also lost a few matches from it. 2335 used a modified kit chassis like ours, but they used a aluminum super frame around it for bumper mounting.