Quote:
Originally Posted by MrForbes
But you're also not guaranteed to build a great robot just because you have money and sponsors. I don't see a very high correlation.
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You don't see a high correlation between team access to resources and robot quality?
I disagree heartily. Money and sponsors certainly don't guarantee team success, but they offer a huge amount of help along the way.
Anecdotally, this year 4464 had a robot budget of $1000 and about 7-8 regular students. We were only able to hobble together the parts for a working robot due to the extraordinary generosity of several local teams. Moreover, the mentors made a conscious decision to step back and give more responsibility to the students, which we think gave them a much more valuable experience.
As a result, while our robot was mechanically finished and fully wired on stop build day, we have not had time to debug essentially any of the code. If we had a couple thousand more dollars in our budget, we would have a
huge advantage over our current position,
simply by being able to test. No withheld parts, no redesigns, simply access to a copy of our robot to test code. This is not possible with our current team, both due to monetary constraints and limited manpower.