I worked with a friend competing for a 0.5M prize to build a robot to collect material on the moon. The project was sponsored by NASA. After that experience, I would be hesitant to enter these kinds of completions. At first it seemed straight forward but as things got closer to the end, tiny details about how to the communicate with the robot and other things were changed. It was discouraging to put in all that work, have everything tested perfectly and then at the last minute some rule change comes along or they change things in the environment that was already tested in.