Who Owns Your Robot?

[craigbutcher]

We are a rookie team and a question came up none of us anticipated. Does your sponsor own your robot? Do any other teams' sponsors hold the robots? Where do you keep the robots from past years?

What is the normal and ordinary practice?

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Technically, our school owns our robot. We keep past years bots inside our team room in the school (dont blink, you might mistake it for the janitors broom closet). This is tough though, because since the robot is 'school property', we have a hard time being able to take it for offseasons and demos.

[dmurdz]

Our team keeps the robot at our team HQ. We have used past year's robots as testing bases and demonstation tools.

It may be a good idea to bring the robot to your sponsor and show how very much they mean to the success of the team.

[Denman]

1)no. They give us the money for our entrance fee mainly and for some other stuff. We consider it ours though
2)?
3) in a shed at school
4)Not sure, this is ours though

[Ryan M.]

Hm... I don't know the technicalities of it all, but I can make guesses. :)

If you're a school-based team (IE, one school and it's a recognized/supported school activity), I'd guess that your school owns the bot. If you're an independent team (random people who came together), the team in general owns it. If you're a multi-school team, it's all muddled.

I don't think your sponsor owns the robot unless that was something they requested when they agreed to sponsor you.

But... I could be wrong. I'm a high shooler, not a lawyer. :D

--EDIT--
We have our robot is a barn one of the families own.

[MattB703]

The situation that you need to work yourselves into is that the team functions as an entity separate from the sponsors and the school and the team owns the robot and related materials. If you can pull off that sort of arrangement it gives you the best flexibility to adapt to unforeseen changes.

[Ian Curtis]

While this question has never came up before I am 99.9% sure the robot is owned by the team. We keep our robots on our mezzanine (which is where our field is) if they still run during the next season they make excellent defenders (just be sure they're on different channels).

[Beth Sweet]

The way I see it, Team 1504 owns our robot. When a sponsor makes a donation, they recieve a tax writeoff, aka, it's a donation not a purchase, excluding them from robot ownership. I don't think that our schools own the robot, #1 because we have two high schools and unless King Solomon's still around... also, because they provide us with students, not funding. This is our team's robot, and I don't believe that anyone has the right to take it from us. Now, if circumstances are different on other teams then I guess it's theirs to decide.

[Biff]

Possession is 9/10 of the law. The bots are in the major mentors garages, we didn't get any space from the 4 high schools that make up our team. Give us a space the bots are still the teams.

[neilsonster]

I suppose technically GM Canada owns our robots since they paid for the majority of the parts, but we donated our first year bot to a local science centre and we keep the other two at our school. So I think GM unofficially gives them to us as a gift as the end of the season.

[Joe J.]

The way I see it the team owns the robots. After we lost our original sponsor back in 2001 the team kept the robots. We do keep our robots on display at Visteon mainly because there isn't much room at the Park, but we can take them out whenever we need them which would be harder to do if they were in the school so its rather convenient for us to keep the at Visteon.

[tiffany34990]

nobody but the team really owes our bots...nobody wants them lol...maybe to display but we keep the all in the back room use them for demos, prototypes and of course competition.

[Jay H 237]

Our team owns the robot and we're able to do whatever we wish with it.

During the summer months the robot stays at a team members house so we can take it to mini-comps and demostrations without worrying about how to get into the school.

Our first robot (the '99 season with the floppies) was donated to the local college (Naugatuck Valley) in 2000. It was used as a reversed engineering assignment for thier CAD classes. It's "remains" in 2000 were structual and mechanical only since all teams had to return the I/O and some other electrical parts at the end of the season back then. It's current status is unknown.

Our 2000-2002 robots were destroyed after any salvagable parts were removed. They were sold for scrap. I know that's the last thing you probably wanted to hear but it's the truth. We had no storage space for them, and after being shuffled around they became "unwanted". The electronics, motors, and pnuematics were saved for testing and prototyping while the remains were cut up and taken to the local scrap dealer.

We still have our 2003 robots bare chassis and miscellaneous parts. Some of us on the team have plans to rebuild it into a driving chassis for programming and testing.

The 2004 robot is still mostly intact (one transmission is apart). We won a regional (NJ) and made it into the championship semi-finals (Archimedes) last year with it so we plan on keeping it around.

[Mike Betts]

We are a rookie team and a question came up none of us anticipated. Does your sponsor own your robot? Do any other teams' sponsors hold the robots? Where do you keep the robots from past years?

What is the normal and ordinary practice?
Craig,

For 90% of the teams out there, you are a school in the USA being sponsored by an American corporation. As a school, your organization is most probably a nonprofit organization. In the U.S., the official designation is that your school is a 501(c)(3) organization.

If your organization is nonprofit, 501(c)(3), and the donation is made on that basis (tax deductible) then the donation is made with no strings attached. This means that the school can use the money to erect a giant statue of a pigeon in the school parking lot instead of building robots and there is not a thing that the corporation can do about it. Note however that it is unlikely that a corporation would continue funding a program which squanders its resources in such a callous manner...

I can not imagine that any sponsor would consider your robot the property of the company.

What does frequently happen is that the school may lend the robot to the company on an indefinite basis for display purposes as the good public relations of community outreach is something that the corporation will want to maximize.

I can't speak to teams in other countries or teams which are not 501(c)(3). However, for the rest of us, the robot would be the property of the school (not of the team).

Regards,

Mike

[Damian Manda]

As a team, we seem to own our own robot. The money used to buy parts and pay entry fees are donated by many sources, so there is no one to really give the robot to other than ourselves. Since we do not have a big sponsor that donates a considerably larger amount than others, this does not seem like a hard choice.

Our old robots are usually taken apart so that we can use the parts next year, but this year we ended up re-assembling it so that we could have a defense robot.

I'm not sure what the general practice is, but I think that most teams usually keep their old robots, as they belong to either the school or the team itself.

[Starke]

hmm. our past years robots are stored in our technology wing in our school. it is nice so when we make a new robot with a similar concept, we can look to see how we did it back then. from more than 2 years ago, the robots are in pieces from using them as scrap materials and parts. it is cool to go upstairs and see random robot frames sitting there with random components.

[kjohnson]

Our robots stay in the school except from shows and demonstrations for sponsors. The 2001 and 2002 bots are there but no longer run (parts). 2003 bot runs but is not fully functional. Our 2004 bot (made it to regional finals) is in perfect working condition. The 2005 bot - well thats in Atlanta :)

[EricH]

Our robots are considered team property, except for the first one or two which went to our major sponsor at the time (JPL). The 2000 bot was destroyed by the salvagers. 2001 could be made functional if someone wanted to do that but it would be a loonng job as parts are missing or scattered. It last ran in 2003. 2002 died this year but has not been scrapped or salvaged at all. 2003 is at our facility and still running as a defense bot. 2004 is working too, but not fully. It was converted into a practice bot for this year.

[Kyle Love]

As far as I know/understand, the team owns our robot. Past years robots go to the front of our shop off to the side. Some are used for extra parts where as some are kept in mint condition. (1992 and 1998 robots) One of our robots (2003) is on loan to a team we are trying to get started for next year. We are only missing one robot, I believe.

[XtremeEagle04]

Our Sponsor (GM) owns our robot, but we keep them at our school in our tech-lab. the 2004 robot works and so does the 2003 bot but the 2002 bot is missing several speed controllers and other various components. We have a spring sports pep-rally that we drive/showcase the robots at each year, it really gets the underclassmen that are unfamiliar with the program excited about joining.

[DarkJedi613]

I suppose technically the school "owns" it, but it belongs to the team. We have our own room and we keep them in there, than once we scrap them (every year before the 2004 one currently), the frames go down into the storage room.

During the summers the robot stays w/ one of our mentors, but it is still the teams. He just plays with it during the summer. ;)

[PURPLE!]

One of our sponsors thinks they own our whole team (which will remain reserved because I don't want to be lynched). Other than that we own our robots. We keep our robots in storage closets in the school actually. Sometimes we keep the robots at someone's garage when we are working on the robot and "borrowing" parts.

Actually yesterday we found the goal to last years game. Ah, that was fun running down the long hallway in our school "surfing" in the goal. :D

[the_short1]

haha.. yea.. we have 2 main schools KOrah in ssm ontario .. and soohigh in ssm michigan.. also we have 1 member from st basils in ssm ontario and some from career center ssm michigan..

that and we have two robots.. what we think will work for us is:

korah gets practice robot (stays in machine shop class <team mentor is the teacher)... as we had two robots from a canadian robotics competition thing from a few years back (much much different then FIRST robotics)

and soohigh gets the competition bot (in their machine shop where the teacher is also a team mentor).. . then next year we switch .. . that way its easier for demonstrations and for showing off..

it really makes a difference having a robot available for demonstrations... we recently showed ours off at a science forum (large expo dealy) .. and also at our local mall and at a sponsers business.. and thru this pr we have received a lot of acknoloedgement and sponserships :D

[craigbutcher]

I really appreciate the information in this post. One of the things about FIRST is that it is not only about engineering things, it is about how human beings work, too. Learning cooperation and ...yes, politics, which is not a dirty word but just what happens when human beings work together without violence... is a critical part of how anything gets done by groups.

I did not forsee this question (ownership) when we started, but it has a lot to do with how we grow from here. Our sponsors have been so generous, and we don't want to repay their generousity with discourtesy, but we now know we also need to know what the expectations are when things are given.

Starting out was kind of a sudden, ad-hoc, organize as we go along in six weeks sprint. Now we want to use what we learned to make the next year another valuable, but different, experience. Anyone who wants to send us stories of the transition from rookie to successful ongoing team, we are eager to hear!

FIRST is terrific!

Craig Butcher

[Tristan Lall]

Something similar did come up in the past...here it is.

From the standpoint of a team like Woburn, which benefits from a bank and the school board as its major sponsors, it is absolutely inconceivable that the sponsors own anything team-related. It's simply a matter of donations paying for the team's expenses.

With the NiagaraFIRST teams, one might argue that the partnership owns the robots, but it still doesn't make sense to say that the sponsors own them. (I'm speculating; one of the senior adminstrative people from NiagaraFIRST could probably answer this definitively, if there is an official position on the matter: try Karthik, rourke or Derek Bessette.)

[Meyerman]

sponser owns the 56 bots
1997- Crusin' Crusader - Destroyed!
1998-RoBBES Roadrunners-Destroyed!
1999-RoBBE Xtreme- still working it was at the school but then given to a student
2000-RoBBE Xtreme II-Destroyed!
2001-RoBBE Xtreme III- its almost Destroyed but base still runs and arm is off i believe if needed can be repaired
2002-RoBBE Xtreme IV- DESTROYED!
2003-RoBBE Xtreme V- Still together no brick so it wont run unless we put the brick back in
2004- RoBBE Xtreme VI- still working but! modified to pick up tetras
2005- RoBBE Xtreme VII- really hoping its still in one piece and working its sitting in Atlanta right now!

the sponsers keep the 56 bots but they let us have them when ever we want they are awsome and really we have no place at our school for the bots we were gunna bring 2003 to the school to modify but we just dont have room to store it.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Our robots are ours. They reside at our build center which just happens to be a sponsor's shop. They are, from 2001-2005, sitting on top of a shelf rack. 1999 and 2000 are no longer with us, RIP my friends. But we do have some of 2000's base and the rest is sitting in a pile of rubbage/scrap in the corner. They are all fully functional, just a few modifications for testing purposes. It would be nice to give the local children's museum one or two, seeing how the top of the shelf rack is now full. We used to have the robots at Sherrard HS but we were kicked out of there. We have full access to the robots. We take them to many demonstrations over the summer and next school year. In fact, last Saturday we used the 2005 robot to demonstrate at the SECME Mousetrap Car Regional at Davenport Central HS. We found out that there are multiple FLL teams in the Davenport District. We were also aproached by two more teachers I believe to help start more FLL teams. Using the robots for demo is awesome.

[Chris Fultz]

Just like everything else in FIRST, it probably depends on how your team is set up.

Cyber Blue, 234. is a "one school" team with several sponsors, big and small. The school has ultimate responsiblilty for the students and the team, they provide the teachers and the workspace and the computers that do all of design work and the machine in the shop we either purchased by the township or donated to the school.

So for us, I would say the robots belong to the school, which is the same as belonging to the team.

The sponsors provide funding and materials and such, but they are donations to the team / school and do not constitute ownership of the program or the robots. If the sponsors would go away, the team would remain.

I know that Rolls-Royce sponsorship of teams is to the schools, for the robotics programs. The teams are allowed to use the money as they need to = parts, hotel rooms, etc., as long as it is team related.

I know that other teams are structured differently and the corporate sponsor may technicaly 'own' the team and bring in students and mentors. The sponsor, in this case, may actually own the program, and terefore, own the robot as well.

I would suggest laying out a plan on what you think ownership should be and get your teams' agreement. If it is really troubling you, then I would also talk to the 'sponsors' about what their expectations are -

[Kit Gerhart]

Our team has two schools and one main sponsor, NASA. Our 2001 robot is on display at the NASA shop where we build our machines. I think one of the older, non-running machines may be at one of the schools. We always keep one or two of the newest robots running for demos, and one of the running robots is usually at the school where our primary teacher mentor, Mrs. P. works.

I don't know who "owns" the robots, but maybe NASA or Brevard School's lawyers do. We consider them to belong to the team.

[Koko Ed]

Our robots are property of the X-Cats. We have almost all of our robots from our years in FIRST (the first robot is on display at FIRST place) and there is simply no room to keep them at Wilson Magnet. Far as I can tell Xerox has no interest in displaying any of our robots niether (remember they'd have to display Sparx and XQ Robotics robots as well. That would eat up alot of space.

[Rick TYler]

For 90% of the teams out there, you are a school in the USA being sponsored by an American corporation. As a school, your organization is most probably a nonprofit organization. In the U.S., the official designation is that your school is a 501(c)(3) organization.

Mike's post is informative. A minor nit-pick, and one that doesn't change the meaning of what he wrote, is that a private school may register as a 501(c)(3), but a public school may not. It is considered a local governmental agency, and is specifically not a registered charitable organization. Please see the IRS guide "Tax Exempt Status for Your Organization." (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p557.pdf) This does not mean that donations to public school FIRST teams are not tax deductible, it just means that they are not 501(c)(3)s.

Now, of course, a lot of schools have associated 501(c)(3) foundations. Sports booster programs are frequently setup as 501(c)(3)s. This allows the booster club to spend money in support of designated programs without direct oversight by employees of the school.

We are currently investigating making our team a 501(c)(3) organization to make it easier to pursue certain kinds of funding, and to remove questions like, "who owns the team's stuff?" Once we incorporate as a 501(c)(3) there won't be any doubt.

[Cyberguy34000]

Ours is a very interesting situation. We're a five 5 high school team and since we're somewhat of a vagabound team, we've never had the same build site year to year, we have to travel kind of light. Our lease on our build site at the mall just ran out, and we're not sure if they're willing to sponsor us with a build site in the storefront for another year. It's highly unlikely. So we've had to make sure that everything we keep is vital. Well our robot from 3 years ago had been canibilized so much that a few of the mentors just decided to retire it to the local garbage dump. One of the students heard about it, went dumpster diving, and now is keeping that monstrosity it in his room. Something about a powered lawn chair mod. :)

Anyways, our robots are owned by the team collectively. And the bots for 03 and 04 are still in perfect working order. Since last years could hang, it works pretty well for demonstrations in gyms and such. They also just look cool in the display (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34484&highlight=662+mall+display). Anyways, the bots are pretty much just property of the team.

[AJL930]

as far as somebody owning our robots, we currently only have two operational robots out of the four the team has built, the 2003 bot and this years robot. We had to gut last years robot for motors for the cart and our first robot for parts. But for owning the other two, the 2003 robot is usually kept in a storage shed or at the shop because we use that one for demonstrations. Im expecting this years robot to suffer the same fate as last years robot.

[nobrakes8]

The team owns the robot. We have our own bank account seperate from the school (this year was an acception since we didn't have a major sponsor the board of education paid for everything this season).. typically the school has no say over when we could use the robot or what to do with it. (they only approve field trips on school days other than that the school has nothing to do with ownership of the robot)

We kind of neglected our sponsors over the past 2 years, we were rookie all-star in 2003, in 2004 we fell into some problems but we got the job done. We think the sponsors felt since we neglected them that we became more established and that we no longer needed them.

We took apart the 2003 robot this year, saved all the motors and stuff (even though they were mostly taken off for testing in 2004)..
All the aluminum with the sponsor logos on it we placed on plaques like tropheys and gave them to our old sponsors. The rest of the robot (which was very little) was scrapped. We hope with the plaques that will have sponsors come back to us again.

The 2004 robot is still intact but since we don't have any room, and it became the robot from hell to work with, I'd be willing to bet we're going to use it for testing parts, more plaques, and a good way to let stress out when we beat it with a hammer. (We didn't have a good 2004 season)