You bring up some good points, but I still have to disagree. The RC is great for FIRST but it has serious limitations. The two main limitations are memory, and its inability to perform complex operations, or multiple operations at once. We can put together a reasonably good PC for $100, for another $200-$300 dollars outfit it with wireless network capabilities and one or more webcams. Then we can pick up all the sonar rangefinders we want for $30 dollars a piece (I am thinking of those Devantech something or others) get motors for another $30 a piece, piece together other sensors from old electronic junk laying around, a few hundred more for other electronic stuff, a few hundred for some encoders, a few hundred for chassis materials, and you are still only talking about a few thousand dollars. The materials I just listed are all aimed at building a robot based on the OAP project (
http://oap.sourceforge.net) which is one thing we are currently investigating, but if you think about it rather than paying $5k for a kit from first you could put together a FIRST robot minus the control system for next to nothing, then put in a PC running linux with wireless network for a few hundred dollars, and there you have yourself a cheaper more capable FIRST robot. Now I understand that the control system is great for the actual competition, my point is simply that there is more to robotics than FIRST.