[mathking]

Originally Posted by SoftwareBug2.0

Forgive me if you've heard me say this before, but I think FIRST needs to make a game where there's a huge penalty for not moving at all during autonomous. The number of teams that do nothing in autonomous every year is ridiculous.

As an example rule, let's say that driver control doesn't begin until you leave the starting zone of the field. You can either make your robot drive a few feet or hope that your teammates come to push you out of the zone.

There's no team where turning on motors for a few seconds is out of reach. If they can't it's because they've prioritized something else.

I get the frustration that many of us feel when many robots don't move during autonomous. This rule at first glance sounds good, but there are some practical problems to think about. The first is that you would need to define the game in the right way to make this practical. In many games there is a substantial penalty when your robot interferes with another robot's autonomous mode. In others there are potentially really bad mistakes that can happen in autonomous that should be avoided. Some teams opt to do nothing not because they can't but because they don't want a mistake to cost their alliance. We have had sensors that prevented a collision during autonomous, making our robot not move very far.

Another consideration is that this rule will definitely lead to more matches (potentially many more) where robots sit and do nothing. There is nothing more frustrating in FRC competition, for any team but particularly for new teams, than having a dead robot.

Yet another consideration would be that sometimes the field communication system can mess up a team's autonomous mode. We had at least one match this year where another team not being able to connect to the field led to a reset of the communications. Our autonomous mode had been selected, but when the field reset this choice was lost. The robot did nothing, even though it was consistently scoring. We ended up losing that match 118-119. That was frustrating but nowhere near as frustrating as it would have been if as a result of a field reset we had not been able to move at all for the entire match.

I think if you want to increase the number of robots that do something in autonomous the best solution is to provide a sufficient incentive to get teams to do something. In general positive incentives tend to be more effective in game theoretic / behavioral economic motivation anyway. (Humans tend to underestimate the chance of events triggering negative consequences and overestimate the chance of events triggering positive consequences.)