[EricH]

I wasn't going to jump in on this... but then I remembered back between the 2010 and 2011 offseasons, someone threw out a challenge to make a fully-autonomous FRC robot. A bunch of folks were seriously thinking of taking him up on it.

Now I'd go into the technical details of what even a fairly simple FRC robot would need for full autonomy, but I don't want to take too long. I'll simply point out that my senior design project in college (a robot) was supposed to be fully autonomous, for a simple (single-purpose) task, and even with only 8 sensors (4 drivetrain encoders, 2 location cameras with defined targets, 2 current sensors, IIRC) and a very simple robot (4 wheels, 1-joint arm with a wrist) we couldn't do it in 2 semesters (9 months). Theoretically, it's not that hard to "drive out X distance, lower arm, drive Y, raise arm, locate base and return", but we still couldn't do it autonomously, though the programmers figured that they could probably have finished it given a little more time. (We ended up ditching all the sensors except maybe the current sensors and just driving manually--which code was done pretty quickly.)

Can it be done? I'm not saying it can't, particularly on a "do this when instructed and I don't want to have to control it all" level. But it is going to take some serious commitment, or a game that requires autonomous operation outside of the 15 seconds, to get more than a few dreamers to make the attempt. And in 6 weeks? I think maybe some groundwork gets laid well ahead of time.