Quote:
Originally Posted by XaulZan11
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Championship is the first and only event for College level-FIRST and there are less than 20 teams. As we all know from watching week 1 events, things rarely go smoothly at the first competitions of the season, let alone of the entire program. Are they really kicking FRC teams out of the dome for an untested game with brand new teams? What if they have connection issues? What if the teams aren't really ready to preform (like teams in week 1 FRC events and rookie FRC teams?). Yes, flying robot could be cooler than FRC robots, but waiting for field connection or seeing flying robot not being able to fly is not inspiring at all.
That being said, College-level FIRST doesn't appear on any Championship schedule (or offfical FIRST anything, I think), so I'm not sure that is a valid reason for the change.
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My personal opinion: For a pilot program, they will have chosen the best few schools to compete (WPI?, MIT?), and there will likely be little problem with things not going at least kind of well.
Flying robots seems to me like a great way to get the attention of people walking in off the street in STL.
EDIT: What I'm getting at here, is the teams who will be competing in the CollegeFIRST pilot are likely comprised of people who've competed in things like the DARPA Grand Challenge, and DARPA Urban Challenge.