BTW, I thinks it's Great that Falcon Robotics has tackled the task of FIRSTing an underwater robotics competition. If they were closer to MD I'd want to send a team.
The more I thought about "problems" with fielding a team for this sort of competition, I realized that an essential isse is that it may be hard to find somewhere to test your robot.
Granted, not many FRC teams have full size playing fields for practice, but at least you can test the drive system anywhere. For a ROV contest, you need a reasonable quantity of water. If your school doesn't have a pool, or (more likely) they won't let you use it for robots, then what's the next option?
Sure you can use a 55 Gallon barrel of water..... but seriously, it's hard to build excitement that way
Once agian, I'm not trying to discourage the idea, I'm just highlighting the key problems, in order that they can be addressed. We don't have a school pool in my area, and even though I'm on a small lake, it would be difficult to use for testing purposes (especially when it's frozen
Luckilly, I've found a firm that will build me a test tank, and I have somewhere to put it. I'm am hugely lucky in this regard.
Phil.