I dont like this idea at all.. and im on a low funded team.
I do agree that some teams have an 'unfair' advantage, but I want to comete with them anyways. Its no fun to be classified based on the amount of money you have.
Just because your low on funding dosn't mean you cant design a very good robot and build it too that quality. You don't need professional machinests to make and weld your robot, that should be the students job anyways. I think that if somthing were to be done about this, there should be a cap on how much money can be spent on the robot's construction... not that i think its that big of a problem.
My team this year consited of 11 or 12 very active people (adults included) and probably about 16 or 17 actually attended the only competition we could afford to attend, the NYC one.
But we finished, and for a brief time we were in first place
We were a new team, but we were able to comete with the heavyweights just fine, we possibally had the most traction of any other robot there, and we could control the bridge very well.
The amount of money dosn't make or break a team... I guess thats what im hitting at here... my team had access to a full machine shop (in the classroom we built it in) and a computer lab with autocad and all the other computer aided deisgn programs (also in our classroom).
Our robot was more reliable then a lot of the 'vetren' team robots.
We didn't have any problems cometeing, our robot wes always in working condition.. never had to even think about using a stretcher. Thats not to say we didnt see the machine shop, infact one of our rubber shaft thingy's (hope you know what im talking about) broke, so we sent 2 people to the machine shop to make new one's out of alluminum (they didnt have any at the booth thingy).
After the first day of competition we completely re-designed and built our ball handling mechinism into a bridge manupulation mechinism, and on the second day helped balnce the goal a few times, and helped other robot's accross the bridge MANY times.
The moral of the story is: A team that literally STARTS with 5000 (and raises the rest) dollars can make it too and succeed in a competition, and should be able to compete with the rest of the teams.
I think everyone here would agree that it is unfair to be bias based on the amount of money someone/somthing has... shouldn't it be the same with FIRST teams?
Greg