They can be spending money on similar things, but just for your knowledge, the GPS sensor isn’t known to be the absolute greatest. Most teams use either inertial sensors or Odometry. Look those up. If you are interested in Odometry (which is the most popular option among most high level teams), this seems like a good place to start: What is Odometry?
No matter what you have for autonomous, it takes a lot of refining and tweaking to get it right. If you don’t have anything that would help with autonomous, the best advice that I can give you is to make and test autonomous routines with a robot battery that is at 80% or higher (the higher the better though), and make some kind of alinger tool to make sure your robot angle is consistent at the start of autonomous routines. Good Luck!