[Joe Johnson]

I hear you with regard to vision. I have seen many teams focus on vision only to never get it on the robot because they didn't make weight or their main program (i.e. the one that allows the robot to MOVE) never gets done (or done right).

That said, our goal is a robot that would likely be playing after lunch on Saturday. At least the past two years, one way to do that has been vision helping locate the goals. Admittedly it is hardly the ONLY way, but certainly part of some team's strategy for success.

Are there pitfalls in this approach? Certainly. But we hope to avoid those traps and model ways for others to avoid them as well.

For example, the ME team knows it has to support the CS team by giving them surrogates early in the 72 hour countdown so that they can develop code before they get THE robot. What is more, they have to deliver a robot that is essentially ready to code with enough ticks on the clock left to allow for the final code deployment.

I think that 72 hours with BOOM DONE.'s talent is a reasonable surrogate for what most teams can get done in the 6 weeks. Time scales pretty well. So if teams should give their coders at least a week then we should have the robot to the coders with 12 hours on the clock or we're doomed. The ME team is shooting for twice that 24 hours.

Lofty goals. Let's see how it turns out.

Dr. Joe