[Jeff McCune]

I've never used CopyCat, but if it assumes the robot controller of past years, it'll be useless for this years robot since it's a completely different programming language.

It sorta irritates me that the First community continually gives less respect to the software engineering aspect of the project and more respect to the mechanical engineering aspects of the project. Remember that what seperates a robot from a glorified radio controlled car is the fact that you have to engineer it to be autonomous.

In the past, many teams programmed nothing and simply used the default code. The addition of autonomous mode was a huge step in the right direction, but I still think the community is doing a lot of hand-holding in this area. Case in point would be the navigation code that's been written that allows teams to navigate to the IR beacon with no programming. That's pretty disheartening.

Just my $0.02.