FIRST is a competition intended to give high school students the experience of working on all stages of a real engineering project in six weeks (Design, Prototype, Build Program, Debug, etc..). FIRST does this by getting all teams to start from scratch with a new game. Although some teams have advantages like a battle-tested drive train that they rebuild every year, it still is a new game with new challenges (like steps to climb). Autonomous has new challenges as well.
FIRST is not an AI development competition like the
RoboCup. They use AI with cameras to play an autonomous game of soccer. Some robots even network with teammates to organize plays, which would be cool for FIRST if IFI would provide the ability for bots to communicate with each other (perhaps that is the future, FIRST loves cooperation). However, Robocop teams same simple goal: kick the ball in the opponent's goal. The game of soccer is much simpler than any FIRST game, which are notorious for their complex scoring systems that many humans can't comprehend. Even if we were given a default camera object recognition system, very, very few teams would be able to teach it to play the game in 6 weeks. Think about all the different objects involved in this year's game (3 types of balls, 4 different goals, etc). All FIRST robots look different, so the only way to tell a friend robot from a foe is those little blinking lights.
This would create a larger gap between the haves and have-nots when it comes to Autonomous. Currently the pinnacle of autonomous is a positional coordinate system (like the ones Wildstang and a few others have). The PIC is powerful enough to allow everyone to do this without external processors. As teams get used the new processor, gyros and encoders in the next few years, many more teams will develop positional systems, including some relatively new teams. It gives all programmers (students and mentors) a lofty, but achievable goal. A camera based AI system in 6 weeks is not an achievable goal for nearly every FIRST team.