Who Owns Your Robot?

[craigbutcher]

We are a rookie team and a question came up none of us anticipated. Does your sponsor own your robot? Do any other teams' sponsors hold the robots? Where do you keep the robots from past years?

What is the normal and ordinary practice?

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Technically, our school owns our robot. We keep past years bots inside our team room in the school (dont blink, you might mistake it for the janitors broom closet). This is tough though, because since the robot is 'school property', we have a hard time being able to take it for offseasons and demos.

[dmurdz]

Our team keeps the robot at our team HQ. We have used past year's robots as testing bases and demonstation tools.

It may be a good idea to bring the robot to your sponsor and show how very much they mean to the success of the team.

[Denman]

1)no. They give us the money for our entrance fee mainly and for some other stuff. We consider it ours though
2)?
3) in a shed at school
4)Not sure, this is ours though

[Ryan M.]

Hm... I don't know the technicalities of it all, but I can make guesses.

If you're a school-based team (IE, one school and it's a recognized/supported school activity), I'd guess that your school owns the bot. If you're an independent team (random people who came together), the team in general owns it. If you're a multi-school team, it's all muddled.

I don't think your sponsor owns the robot unless that was something they requested when they agreed to sponsor you.

But... I could be wrong. I'm a high shooler, not a lawyer.

--EDIT--
We have our robot is a barn one of the families own.

[MattB703]

The situation that you need to work yourselves into is that the team functions as an entity separate from the sponsors and the school and the team owns the robot and related materials. If you can pull off that sort of arrangement it gives you the best flexibility to adapt to unforeseen changes.

[Ian Curtis]

While this question has never came up before I am 99.9% sure the robot is owned by the team. We keep our robots on our mezzanine (which is where our field is) if they still run during the next season they make excellent defenders (just be sure they're on different channels).

[Beth Sweet]

The way I see it, Team 1504 owns our robot. When a sponsor makes a donation, they recieve a tax writeoff, aka, it's a donation not a purchase, excluding them from robot ownership. I don't think that our schools own the robot, #1 because we have two high schools and unless King Solomon's still around... also, because they provide us with students, not funding. This is our team's robot, and I don't believe that anyone has the right to take it from us. Now, if circumstances are different on other teams then I guess it's theirs to decide.

[Biff]

Possession is 9/10 of the law. The bots are in the major mentors garages, we didn't get any space from the 4 high schools that make up our team. Give us a space the bots are still the teams.

[neilsonster]

I suppose technically GM Canada owns our robots since they paid for the majority of the parts, but we donated our first year bot to a local science centre and we keep the other two at our school. So I think GM unofficially gives them to us as a gift as the end of the season.

[Joe J.]

The way I see it the team owns the robots. After we lost our original sponsor back in 2001 the team kept the robots. We do keep our robots on display at Visteon mainly because there isn't much room at the Park, but we can take them out whenever we need them which would be harder to do if they were in the school so its rather convenient for us to keep the at Visteon.

[tiffany34990]

nobody but the team really owes our bots...nobody wants them lol...maybe to display but we keep the all in the back room use them for demos, prototypes and of course competition.

[Jay H 237]

Our team owns the robot and we're able to do whatever we wish with it.

During the summer months the robot stays at a team members house so we can take it to mini-comps and demostrations without worrying about how to get into the school.

Our first robot (the '99 season with the floppies) was donated to the local college (Naugatuck Valley) in 2000. It was used as a reversed engineering assignment for thier CAD classes. It's "remains" in 2000 were structual and mechanical only since all teams had to return the I/O and some other electrical parts at the end of the season back then. It's current status is unknown.

Our 2000-2002 robots were destroyed after any salvagable parts were removed. They were sold for scrap. I know that's the last thing you probably wanted to hear but it's the truth. We had no storage space for them, and after being shuffled around they became "unwanted". The electronics, motors, and pnuematics were saved for testing and prototyping while the remains were cut up and taken to the local scrap dealer.

We still have our 2003 robots bare chassis and miscellaneous parts. Some of us on the team have plans to rebuild it into a driving chassis for programming and testing.

The 2004 robot is still mostly intact (one transmission is apart). We won a regional (NJ) and made it into the championship semi-finals (Archimedes) last year with it so we plan on keeping it around.

[Mike Betts]

Originally Posted by craigbutcher

We are a rookie team and a question came up none of us anticipated. Does your sponsor own your robot? Do any other teams' sponsors hold the robots? Where do you keep the robots from past years?

What is the normal and ordinary practice?

Craig,

For 90% of the teams out there, you are a school in the USA being sponsored by an American corporation. As a school, your organization is most probably a nonprofit organization. In the U.S., the official designation is that your school is a 501(c)(3) organization.

If your organization is nonprofit, 501(c)(3), and the donation is made on that basis (tax deductible) then the donation is made with no strings attached. This means that the school can use the money to erect a giant statue of a pigeon in the school parking lot instead of building robots and there is not a thing that the corporation can do about it. Note however that it is unlikely that a corporation would continue funding a program which squanders its resources in such a callous manner...

I can not imagine that any sponsor would consider your robot the property of the company.

What does frequently happen is that the school may lend the robot to the company on an indefinite basis for display purposes as the good public relations of community outreach is something that the corporation will want to maximize.

I can't speak to teams in other countries or teams which are not 501(c)(3). However, for the rest of us, the robot would be the property of the school (not of the team).

Regards,

Mike

[Damian Manda]

As a team, we seem to own our own robot. The money used to buy parts and pay entry fees are donated by many sources, so there is no one to really give the robot to other than ourselves. Since we do not have a big sponsor that donates a considerably larger amount than others, this does not seem like a hard choice.

Our old robots are usually taken apart so that we can use the parts next year, but this year we ended up re-assembling it so that we could have a defense robot.

I'm not sure what the general practice is, but I think that most teams usually keep their old robots, as they belong to either the school or the team itself.