[Joe G.]

For FRC to achieve its culture changing goals, the competitions must be exciting and accessible for the general public. This means that someone who is not well-versed in the technologies involved in the robots should be able to walk into a competition and be immediately impressed by the task. Of course, one wants to preserve the opportunity for students to learn advanced engineering concepts. But raising the minimum acceptable performance by creating autonomous games would result in many more "failed robots" than you see today, and lowering the bar enough to make the game more autonomous friendly would ruin the spectacle.

A good example of what I mean is Lunacy. It's not a very popular game. I think a big reason why is that it crippled FRC robots' potential. Here we have these sophisticated machines, with industrial control systems and drive trains capable of precision maneuvering, and then we cripple them by making them slide around out of control on a slick surface and slick wheels. Those of us who bury ourselves neck-deep in the robots know all about the intricate details of the challenge, and the impressive things top teams came up with to operate as well as they did, like fans and follower wheels. But to the casual observer, a lunacy robot manuvering was simply not an impressive thing to watch, especially when compared to robots that climb a pyramid or shoot basketballs or launch a track ball.


Sidenote: Lunacy was also the last FRC game to encourage autonomous interaction with your opponents. In theory it sounded like it should have worked like it did in the game animation, with robots chasing each other using vision code. In practice, it resulted in 6-way collisions at the center of the field 90% of the time, with the occasional robot dead reckoning over to a loading station, and practically no reliable autonomous scorers. Even with no interaction from 2010-on, autonomous mode has been much more exciting since the mid-field lines started appearing in the rulebook.


The simple truth is, FRC consists of complex robots built by teams of high schoolers in six week periods, and plenty of teams struggle with it already the way it is. Demanding that these robots match the performance of cutting edge professional robots may increase the technical learning opportunities for some, but would push many away from the sport, and make getting interested in it even more difficult.