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What is considered professionally made?
It is going to be tough to decide where the boundry is for professionally made? What if you sponser has a CNC in house or milling and lathe all in house and someone on your team knows how to run it. The result is the same and it dodn't cost the team any more money. We have 6 gearboxes on the robot all made by the engineers on the tools in the labs at work but the final product is no different than if we had one of the machine shop vendors do it. I agree a big budget helps this project, but a small budget and alot of available resources that you can use is just as important. There will be no way first can limit making parts for the robot and at that point there is no way to differentiate between in house and bought. Some of our prototype labs have unbelievable equipment that can make almost anything. Welding is just as big of an issue, correctly welding aluminum (especially thin stock) is an ART. For all of the teams out there who have a person on the team that can do aluminum welding, go pat them on the back. For teams that don't you again are possibly at a disadvantage. To save weight this year we took off fasteners and started welding but you can't do it if you don't have a welder.
My opinion is this event is about as fair as what you can expect in real world engineering. Some jobs are low budget some have unlimited budgets. Sometimes they have to compete with each other. The trick is to do the best with what you have, money can't always buy the best design
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