I wish Hypnotoad had left the last paragraph out of his first post. Instead of having a worthwhile discussion whether autonomous is becoming simpler, it turned into everyone teaming up against a high school student. It can be hard for a high school student to realize they are wrong, or when they are arguing instead of debating; I was the same way, and quite possibly still am. Nothing will be gained by telling him he's wrong and has things to work on, nor by him telling everyone else he has nothing to work on. If a team wants to do all kinds of awesome complex programming that's great, and if a team wants to just have basic functionality that's great too.
I hope we can all get back to his intended topic, or create a new thread for a fresh start.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tanis
FIRST always provides some low hanging fruit for autonomous mode. The vision targets, extra points for scoring in autonomous, and mobility points are clear examples of things you can do with your robot in autonomous.
However, there are plenty of higher hanging fruit that FIRST doesn't necessarily point out for teams. FIRST expects that teams that can go above an beyond a basic autonomous mode are also capable of defining their own stretch goals to challenge themselves..
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This is a great point. In my opinion, FIRST started adding the low hanging fruit in 2010. Since then there has been a simple(ish) task a team can do so they can complete "their autonomous task." Ex: scoring an ubertube, scoring your preloaded balls/frisbees. There has also been a much harder task for more advanced software teams to complete. Ex: 2 ubertubes, picking up and scoring extra balls/frisbees. I think this is a great thing.
From 2006-2009, there really wasn't a viable "robot autonomous task." In 2008 our robot was only able to cross one line and get four points. As the programmer and driver, I often felt like I was letting our alliance down by not having a higher scoring auto, and at times it seemed other teams felt we were letting them down. What they didn't know is that I had written a four line auto that would knock both our balls down(0% chance of working; I was an optimistic sophomore) but never had time to work with the robot due to that being a long build season for us. It really was not a positive experience for anyone on our alliance.
All that to say: I think FIRST has done a phenomenal job of late providing a simple(ish) task so teams can feel they did their jobs and contributed to the alliance, while still allowing more skilled teams to do more for extra points.