[GeeTwo]

Forget water games. Do you really thing FIRST is going to risk foundation damage by putting several thousand gallons of water on the floors of high school gymnasia at districts? FIRST is heavily invested in the roughly 27' x 54' field and 3 vs 3 format. The control system for 2015 was new, so don't expect any major changes there for three or four years. Carpet has been the primary surface except for Maize Craze and Lunacy, so I'll give that a 90+% likelihood for 2016.

According to my research, every even year has had spherical balls as the primary game pieces, going all the way back to Maize Craze in 1992. Zone Zeal (2002) and First Frenzy (2004) also had movable goals, and First Frenzy had two different ball sizes. Except for the endgame of FIRST Overdrive (2008), stacking or hanging game pieces has been exclusively an odd-year endeavor. I fully expect a return to defense, mandatory bumpers, and one or more thrown or at least throwable spherical game pieces for 2016.

It's been a while since robots could carry a lot of game pieces. This year there was no legal limit, but very few carried more than eight (a 42 point stack) at a time. The past three years had limits of four or fewer game pieces at a time. I didn't check the rules for Logomotion (2011), but from the videos it looked like robots carried one inner tube at a time. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot of relatively small balls in 2016, with no carry limit.

Within my team, I'm stumping for an off-season build of an autonomous robot that cleans up the balls from the tennis court and returns them to an open-topped box or bin; we should learn something useful for next year. And oh yes, tennis balls would be a nice 25th anniversary touch.