[RyanCahoon]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Inspiration! With a fully auto robot, there is no need for drivers, strategy or data observers or interaction with other teams.

Originally Posted by 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.

Along these lines, I think having humans in the game also makes the game more interesting in a direct manner: humans like watching humans (this is why professional sports are so popular). I think if we removed or distanced humans from the visible part of the competition, it would make the game much less attractive to the general public, but also to students who may not have "drunk the koolaid" completely yet.

When you come down to it, FIRST is about people inspiring other people; STEM and the robots are just the subject matter.

It's been commonly pointed out that automobile racing is one of the closest other sports to FIRST. I think there's something to be said for why so much of the presentation of those sports focuses on the drivers, when it could very easily have a much greater focus on the cars. Much of the technical information presented serves as much to illustrate how impressive the feats are that the drivers are performing as it does to laud the performance of the cars.

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That said, I'd love to see more autonomous in FIRST games. I'm personally in favor of an autonomous zone, rather than a time period.