Industry Partnership
SWYFT Robotics.
Matthew Thomas, CEO of SWYFT Robotics: “The partnership with ITKAN is the biggest win-win. Their students contribute to the design, manufacturing, and launching of new products, and we aim to build future careers for their students.”
3,000+
Teams using the CAD library
20
Countries reached
50
Assemblies published
Most industry partnerships in robotics are a factory tour and a photo. This one puts students inside the product cycle: they design parts, strength-test SWYFT's existing products, and work to the same tolerances the vendor's customers do. SWYFT calls it a team-based design philosophy, which in practice means a student's work either holds up under load or gets sent back.
ITKAN and SWYFT run an FTC Ri3D build together: a full competition robot designed, fabricated and driven in seventy-two hours, with the CAD released openly at the end. The build has drawn over 100,000 views from teams using it to work out their own season strategy.
The clearest artifact of the partnership is an open-sourced CAD library: configurable drivetrains, SWYFT Slides, mounts, around fifty assemblies in all. It is free, and this season more than 3,000 FRC and FTC teams across 20 countries built with it.
That number is the point. A part designed by an ITKAN student in Plano ends up on a robot in a country nobody on the team has visited, which is a different kind of result than a trophy.
The SWYFT Laser-Cutting Center at the ITKAN Innovation Hub ships free laser-cut parts to teams across East, West and North Texas, including teams with no connection to ITKAN. A team that cannot afford a machine shop is not a team that should lose on manufacturing.