Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Hill
Why stop at college? A corporate level would be amazing to watch as well. No money cap, no bagging...We could get to see how well Honda's robotics division could face off against Google's acquired Boston Dynamics...Companies have big egos and like to show how much better they are than their competition.
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www.formula1.com - Build engines and chassis that go as fast as possible, with fairly game-changing rule changes every 4-5 years. Budgets in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
www.fiawec.com - Build engines and chassis that go fast and last a long time. WEC engineering and tech development is actually _extraordinarily_ interesting these days, with their fairly wide-open engine/powertrain-development rules.
The main constraint on "corporate-level" competitions are:
-They need to be self-funded: No shareholder will ever approve of a company spending their best and brightest's time on something that doesn't have a return to the company. In the case of racing, that return is advertisement and tech development.
-It needs to be interesting to the public: This falls out of the self-funding requirement - you need to be able to attract spectators, which means that you're limited to things that are a spectacle (racing, fighting robots, etc). There is a whole universe of things that are fascinating engineering challenges that wouldn't be viable as a high-budget adult-level competition because there'd be no source of prize money/competition funds from sponsors/advertisers/spectators.
-It needs to not expose proprietary tech: If you're competing with a product that you may someday put out to market, you don't want it publicly exposed until it's ready. Imagine if Simbotics Inc. or RoboWranglers LLC wanted to make a tote-organizing robot for public sale in 2016: They wouldn't want to have us all able to copy it now.