Hi all,

Long story short, our Uni society has a budget for making some fighting robots, and I'd like your opinion on what would be more worthwhile.

As it stands we have a good engineering background and access to tools and machinery (including free 3D printing), but a limited material and parts budget, of somewhere around £100 - 150 ish.

We're considering either building a whole bunch of antweights, a few less beetleweights, or 1 featherweight.
We'd like to build into a class that is active in the community that we can find some fights for, but for the ant and beetle classes, we'd also be running our own internal tournament. I'd be interested in knowing what you think would be most worthwhile?

We have around 20 members that turn up to every meeting, and around 5-10 that have expressed interest and started to 3d print prototypes for an antweight.

In the long run we'd like to design a common chassis and system for all the robots we create, and encourage our members to add on the weapon and make minor adjustments etc to the design, 3D print their ideas and test them out against the rest of the bots, so that for newcomers and first years there's as small of a barrier to entry as possible.
This way we can buy a couple of sets of batteries, recievers, motors etc. and share them amongst as many designs as possible so we can eek out our budget.
I'd imagine that once they're comfortable with our "standard" bots, they could go off and make their own. Does this sound feasible? (bear in mind that's more of an "at some point" goal at the moment)

At the end of the day, none of us have any experience with this at all, and I'd appreciate any pointers.

Thanks,
J Thomas Morris