[mathking]

As several posters pointed out, human - robot interaction is part of the future. Designing technology to work with people is an essential part of the engineering. Our robot in Lunacy could (and did) score on opponents, but we based our strategy on getting a lot of balls to our human player and trying to get other robots as close to him as possible. I don't think I would want that much human scoring every year, but I also don't think it killed inspiration. Certainly it did not for our team. As I said, we planned our robot design and strategy around involving the human player.

As for flinging the tubes this year, yes human players can throw the tubes. But it is NOT going to be nearly as easy as everyone thinks to get tubes to robots in the scoring zone. First off, there will be lots of tubes that hit towers and fall in the middle. Second, there will be tubes that land in the opponents lanes, off-limits to the side that threw the tube. Finally, some number of the tubes are going to either land short or hit the far wall and bounce back out of the scoring zone. In short, if people are throwing tubes during a match there will be a lot of tubes landing in the middle of the field. Which changes strategy.

Remember at the start of the season many people were arguing that picking up off the floor wouldn't be that important? If you are not planning to throw any tubes that may well be true. But if you are planning to throw tubes, picking up off the floor is important. This means that a decision on human player strategy means a decision on engineering design strategy.

One thing that active human player involvement does is level the playing field. Look at some of the videos of really impressive robots that are out there for this year. A number of these (I am not going to throw out team numbers because I am NOT criticizing these teams) robots are beyond the capabilities of most teams involved in FRC competition. They are really marvels of engineering. And will no doubt be very effective. But a simpler robot paired with a human player who is accurate when throwing tubes across the field goes a long way toward a more even competition. And there is nothing wrong with that. The students are not going to be less inspired because their human player helped them win.

At our competition in 2004 their was a team with a really simple robot that basically only herded balls to their human player. But it was effective at getting the balls to the human player and she was really good. We had a really cool, well engineered (over-engineered and too large) mechanical arm and a fantastic winch (it once lifted two robots). From an engineering standpoint our robot was much more "advanced" than theirs. When they beat us (because she outscored our 50 points for hanging) our kids didn't think that was wrong. They thought "Why didn't we realize that such a simple ball gathering technique and a good human player could have made us a much better team?" That was pretty much exactly the sentiment in our plusses and deltas meeting after the competition.