I would challenge your definition of a robot. What I get from dictionary.com:
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a machine that resembles a human and does mechanical, routine tasks on command.
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Our robots may not always resemble humans, but they DO perform routine tasks on command - simply driving forward on command could be considered to meet this part of the definition, even if that's all the robot does.
For your point of trying to go fully autonomous... Attempting to create something fully autonomous that can react appropriately to random events (ie other robots) in its surroundings is hard. Really hard. I don't care how good of a programming team you have, there's pretty much no way you'll beat a driver with just 6 weeks of design and programming.
That said, I always encourage teams to automate as much as is reasonable. For example, this year my team's climbing mechanism was as close to fully autonomous as you could get - manual lining up and triggering, and a safety release to stop it in mid-motion if needed, but once it started lifting there was no human feedback to keep it going from one level to the next. This was really only possible because we could be sure of there being no "random" interference from other robots during the process!
And localized GPS isn't a perfect solution, either. A couple of years ago I watched a college/post-college autonomous snow plow competition, and many of the competitors utilized localized GPS to help guide their robots. Despite this (and the fact that they had much longer to work on the robots AND much less complex robots - ie a drivetrain with a blade in front - than we do), no competitor performed perfectly. They all missed some area of the pre-planned course. They all wandered off course a bit and had to be manually reset.
Also, consider years where there is no way to know ahead of time where the game pieces will be at any point in the match. They aren't always fed in from a slot, whose location and orientation is known. Sometimes (quite often, actually) they're bouncing around the field and have to be tracked down. robot position for that doesn't matter - vision tracking of moving objects is. In fact, the only real constant we've had (except for Lunacy) in the past few years or so is goals - they seem to always have some sort of vision target available, which really is all a robot should need to line itself up to score appropriately. But even doing that much is incredibly difficult to do in the code.