the war for king of the hill was simply a mistake in the scoring system. KOTH (in most cases) decided the match and auton or no auton that was gonna be the case. last year was 100% human control and at the Champs in the elimination a lot was decided in the first 5 seconds. All hammond had to do was deploy their pneumatic, fall over, drive a little ways, lock on and the game was basically over (except at IRI where some crafty driving stopped the beast). then the game became a pushing match against hammond. we have to face it...for the last two years, the game has revolved around drivetrains. to be competitive you have to maximize power while maximizing torque. leave the auton, it made human playering a lot more fun because you could try to mess it up...plus it forced better programming that couldn't be messed up.

Re: Middle??
 

I wouldn't challenge Mr. Wetzel's source... as he said, this man is very evil and Im 90% sure know exactly who it is....

A question but why do you need to know where the robot is??? There are few types of autonomous competitions that involve a robot not knowing where it is and ambling along to find it's objective. A suggestion from me would to set up a mini sumo competition.
Microprosser smipcropresser. I do not need one to build an autonomous robot.

those are small robots with one intention, to push the other robot out of the field. similarly, the soccer robots are meant to find a soccer ball and "kick it." i saw some robots that chase each other, "sheep" and "wolves" style to get power to continue to run.

the main difference is all of those robots are designed with one purpose in mind, and over a large period of time (large being over 6 weeks).

take a FIRST bot now. most teams aren't done till the last week. that leaves barely any time for testing. the autonomous program also has to mesh with the human controlled mode. it has to take everything the robot does into account. it's not easy, and when you have a 130 lbs robot, it gets all that much harder.

it's not impossible, but with the current equipment it'll be hard.

Autonomous at the end would have been interesting last year by allowing the "home and away" type devices to operate in the last ten or fifteen seconds making this a more pivotal part of the game. actually i think almost any past game could have been accented by a touch of autonomous. I never liked the fact that a good auton usually determined the match.

Anyway the point I was trying to make was that if autonomous was in the middle of the game there would be a shift from navagation and to knowing where you are to collesion advoidence and object identification. This would be kind of hard with the senors we have now.

Running the entire match in autonomous mode == Dreadful, simply dreadful!
What's next, filling the stands with mannequins and tape-recorded cheers - laptops running Power Point loops for the judges? //end sarcasm

KotH was exciting - keep it.
Autonomous at the beginning - KISS, for all the above language and build-time constraints.
More terrain features - let's build a real suspension - so much for KISS :)

Absolutely. To a point, autonomous makes the game more exciting. Rely on it too much, and it may get less exciting. The combo of autonomous and human control makes FIRST unique, and I think that's a good direction to go in. Make auto more important, but still allow for that added dimension that humans bring to the equation.

My 2 cents
 

In my mind this year's autonomous period was well-suited to this year's game. It added a level of complexity and challenge, but IMHO didn't necessarily determine the outcome of the match.

The big problem I saw was that the combination of 6 week build and limited or no practice ramp availability at regionals heavily favored the more experienced teams. Even a simple dead reckoning system took some time to fine tune with a ramp at your disposal.

Of the three regionals I attended (Chesapeake, Philly, and J&J) only Chesapeake had a practice ramp. If your first regional didn't have a practice ramp and if you weren't somewhere in the ballpark when you unpacked, it was difficult to get autonomous working, even if you had no other robot problems.

Of course if your team had deep pockets and could built two robots and a ramp, you could get it all working in the time between shipping and your regionals. This advantage could be at least partially offset for smaller and rookie teams if all regionals had adequate practice areas. This would also benefit all teams when it was necessary to replace motors or make other drive system changes during competitions.

I think that autonomous mode should definitely be kept. Because without it us programmers have really no purpose since driver mode isn't too hard to program. However I don't really mind the length of the autonomous mode or where it is. Anything can be done with enough caffiene. :D

I merged this and another very similar autonomous thread.
Hopefully it didn't get too hard to read now.. oops.

And, to add to the discussion, I still stand by my 'random autonomous period(s)' idea. :D

My only real problem with this years field is that KotH got so much points and it was easy to get up on it. My idea would be for a KotH thing next year, but have auton on the last 15 seconds. That would allow for a more vicious and cooler battle up-top for points. This could be done by sensors and other field detection features.

I didnt know that vicious battles were what the game was about.
It would be cool to see alittle more auto mode but i know the first 15 seconds of the match and the last 15 seconds of the match I was really nurvious. I also like the idea of having the auto mode in the middle of the match.

i think that autonomous should be kept.. it makes a new path that programmers can take.. robots in real companies dont run with a driver behind them, pressing buttons, telling them what to do.. its all autonomous. the is just another way of FIRST opening the doors for future knowledge into high schools and colleges.

If the game is like this year's, I don't like the idea of autonomous mode at the end of the game. I think that if the autonomous period was at the end of the match this year, many teams would opt to not even bother with autonomous programming - just get to the top with more than 15 seconds to go, deploy a lock-down mechanism, and you don't need any autonomous code.

In almost every game since I've been involved in FIRST (7 years now), the opening move of the match usually sets the stage for the rest of the match (i.e. the opening is VERY important). Therefore, by making the autonomous period at the beginning, it forces the teams to take it seriously and makes the teams be creative.

-Chris