Interesting Newsletter from NI

[Thermal]

You fail to realize that hundreds of teams are lacking in money due to pulled sponsorships with this economy, and functional ROV's are easily, EASILY anywhere from 3 to 10 times more expensive than our normal land bots.

No team can afford to build an ROV of this kind of size (28" x 38"). If they were to decrease the robot dimensions to make this sort of game feasible i'd consider it an extreme step down for FIRST.

Also correct me if i'm wrong, but wouldn't the bots have to be tethered? I'm not sure how well radio signals travel through something like water. I think the higher the frequency the worse it travels through water, so we'd have to be on some super low frequency channels to play with an untethered bot. I'm not sure there is enough bandwith to control a robot at those frequencies.