I did a fair amount of high-school and college robotic competitions (The college experience focused on autonomous underwater vehicles at AUV-AUVSI competitions).

It's a very cool way to get hands on experience across a wide number of technical disciplines.

I found the write-up was good, I especially loved the focus on what went wrong and the last minute fixes (They're unavoidable at competitions like this - nothing like rebuilding critical parts at midnight, or scrambling to fix a bug in the 20 minutes you have between runs).

That said - I'd really have liked a cost breakdown of this bot. Just eye-balling some of the components here, I'm guessing we're around 10k, but it can vary a ton, and I'm about a decade out on pricing.

Some of the teams at the competitions I participated in went in with budgets in the low hundreds of thousands (University of Central Florida pretty consistently spent ~75k a year on their hardware, not counting travel or other expenses) and some went in with complete shoe-string budgets in the 5k range.

I'd love to get an idea of what budget was planned for this, what ended up being more expensive, and what ended up being less.