So this is just a general question. On average, how much does your robot cost you? There are a lot of teams out there that are new with a low budget and im curious as to how much veteran teams put into their designs. Over the years ive spent on my team we’ve built up quite a large supply of parts so as the years progressed we didnt need to purchase quite as many parts. Usually every year we are given a $1000 or higher budget and at this point the robot has only cost us about half. I know of a new team that went as far as $20,000 worth of parts and starter kits. So if you could share the general amount I think it would help newer teams understand what goes into a well built, competition ready robot.
The cost of a robot depends a lot on the game being played. For example, Skyrise required a lot of parts to build the huge six foot lifts, so robots cost a lot more. Meanwhile, Toss Up required way less parts to build the shorter robots, which meant that robots cost less. There are tons of factors that go into robot cost. For example, many older teams use pneumatics systems, which cost a lot. In general, though, a good robot costs about $5000. One could probably do with something around $3000, though.
tl;dr: $5000, maybe $3000
It also depends on how well you have your robot planned out. If you don’t need a lot of extra parts and know exactly what you need, you can save money. Steel vs aluminum also allows for saving. I would second $3000 in general.
I think $3000 is the upper end of the range.
The open source robot project has a BOM cost at $1600, that’s probably the low end for a competition robot. This design from sack attack (linky) came in at $1250. Add more structure, motors, pneumatics etc. and perhaps you are at $2500.
For us a good robot runs between $4,000 and $6,000
I think that the total cost of all the parts on our robot is about 3,000 to 3,500 dollars, but because our team has so many parts from the years we have been doing this, we have spent $0 this year so far.
Starting the new team is nearly $2000-$3000 if you do pneumatics but a returning team uses a fair amount of parts from the previous season. So once you are over the initial hump, you can spend much less in the following seasons. We spend about $1700 per returning team each year.
I surely hope teams aren’t spending $6000 on their robot every year, even while having parts from the previous year.
Last year, without having any parts to begin with, I built a 15", 12-motor (plus pneumatics) VEX U robot for team BNS, and spent a total of $1605.80 (including shipping).
Just an interesting side-note, I calculated that (assuming a robot costs ~$1600) it would cost less than $5000 to start a new VEX team, including paying for registration, tournaments (~6 local events, a more costly state championship, and the new slightly-higher world championship cost), a field perimeter kit, tiles, and the current year’s game elements.
I know that I myself personally have spent a total of 1500ish dollars over the course of three years. I started with the classroom compitetion kit which is around 1000 and than bought some more steel and mecanum wheels and I’ve just kept re-using and re-using metal.
What I meant was assuming we would buy all new parts like a new team (which we don’t) also including local competition registration fees and all the gear needed to keep the robot running.
For Skyrise, aluminum kits were a must, so I think our robot cost maybe a bit below $1500. That is without pneumatics.
This year, robots wouldn’t need too much aluminum (or metal), so the full cost should ideally be between $1000 and $2000 (with pneumatics).