The Robonauts 118 - 2013 Video

[thefro526]

Originally Posted by makahn64

I guess I'd like to see a bill of materials. If you had to build this robot in the real world it would cost a lot more than $4K. IMHO it's about time FRC started leveling the playing field for teams that don't have a NASA facility to build the robot for them.

... Seriously?

Originally Posted by R14

The BOM cost of each non-KOP item must be calculated based on the unit fair market value for the material and/or labor, except for labor provided by team members (including sponsor employees who are members of the team) and shipping.

By your logic, there is no team in FRC that would be able to field a legal robot. Assuming a team purchased nothing to build their robot, then they would be left with $4,000 to put towards man power. Even at federal minimum wage, this works out to ~550 man hours... I'm confident that every machine that you'll see on the field this year has more time into it than that.

Even if we ignore man power and consider the machines used, I'd say that you'd still be hard pressed to find a machine that didn't have more than $4,000 in billable machine use/time. (Seems like even smaller/newer teams have a minimum of $2k-3k in tools)