[Jared Russell]

Logomotion struck a good balance between difficulty and reward as far as autonomous mode goes. It was fairly easy to get something that would score a tube most of the time (manipulator and lift design permitting), and FIRST provided an out of the box solution for line following. But in order to be flexible with where you start, get the reliability up to 100%, and do things like two tubes, teams had plenty of room (and incentive) to go above and beyond.

My only complaint is that with static fields, game pieces that the team is allowed to position themselves, and no contact during autonomous mode, many teams (my own included) have basically been able to do nothing but dead reckoning with a gyro and encoders and succeed the past two seasons. FIRST keeps giving us sensors in the kit, but not a lot of incentive to use them. There has got to be a balance between the ease of dead reckoning and the risk/reward of using vision or other sensors that is better than what we had in 2010 and 2011. I think 2006 was the last time they got it right.

(Yes, I know teams X and Y used cameras and line followers with great success, but the most impressive auto modes of the past several years - the 2008 1+ lappers, the 2010 bump crossers, the 2011 double tubers - have largely used encoders and gyros).