Quote:
Originally Posted by DonRotolo
Fully autonomous matches are kind of a bummer for the drive team, too.
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As both a driver and a programmer, I suppose it's unfair for me to say that I wouldn't mind either way
In all seriousness, however, I would think that such an endeavor would require a different kind of support for the team, where the programmers/controls engineers are at the forefront of the competition. Could be interesting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DonRotolo
I agree that few if any teams could field an effective fully auton robot given the 6 week build, But if there was a side competition - say, in mid-December, using 'last year's' rules, some teams might make a pretty good go of it. The biggest issue I see is that those teams would be spread far & wide, making an actual competition an expensive proposition (=travel) for most of them.
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The logistics issue that you raise is a valid one, but my guess is that such an event would cater mainly to local teams, like other scrimmages (Ramp Riot, Monty Madness, etc). I suppose I put this idea out there just to see if others also thought that a simple auton-oriented side competition would be interesting, or worth competing in for teams.
It seems that many in this thread support the idea of putting trackers on the robots that are observed by an external sensor above all the robots. My concern with this is still the potential technical complication, as well as the loss of strict relevance to FRC. In other words, a navigation system reliant on an external sensor can't be effectively adapted for a regular FRC game, since the infrastructure doesn't exist in regular FRC games.
Also, an external tracking system seems like it would lend itself most to robot-robot interaction, right? Would an autonomous game with less robot-robot interaction/collaboration be worth it? Are there other potential solutions for interacting with other robots without using external sensors or data, such as computer vision detection? Either way, were I to design a simpler FRC game for use in an Autonomous Scrimmage I would probably not emphasize the robot-robot interaction, to "level" the playing field for teams that choose simpler methods to score points in this hypothetical game.