[donald_pinckney]

My opinion is that autonomous mode should actually be autonomous, and it should exist to challenge programmers in FIRST. Once you have a functional Kinect style setup working, then you can do almost anything in autonomous with very little effort (amazing goalie bots). However, I prototyped autonomous (actually autonomous) CV goalie bot code shortly after Kickoff: I used image processing in Matlab to prototype detection of either red or blue bumpers of other robots to either avoid enemy goalies or detect enemy shooters. This is a complicated system and would take much more tweaking to get it to work right compared to Cheesy Vision, but if teams were to accomplish a programming task such as this, I think it would in the end be a much more fulfilling and educational experience.