[Madison]

Originally Posted by Karthik

This is correct. IFI began sponsoring our team in 2008, and only began doing sheet metal for us in 2009. Each year that IFI has done sheet metal for us, major parts of our robot have still been done in house. (Drivetrain in 2009, Hanger in 2010, Minibot deployment in 2011) If you look at our robots closely, you'll notice that there is a very homemade feel to certain parts of them. For example, this year's robot features two plastic drinking cups, a fishing pole and a chunk of wood. (Much to the chagrin of some, and to the pleasure of others)

Don't take this the wrong way, y'all -- but one of the things that some of the folks on my team and myself liked about your 2008 robot was that it was kinda ugly.

You don't get to see that stuff on a webcast and so teams fill in the blanks on their own, but the reality is that no team is building robots that we can't manage to make ourselves. We all have different capabilities and it'd definitely be implement certain mechanisms with more/different/better resources, but there are always ways around the roadblocks.