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This year they worked all the way through, and I think evened the playing field that little bit more. If the rules were such that the robots had to score the small balls as well, it'd be that much more difficult for the less experienced teams to participate... not to mention there would be even more for the robots to do this year... Herding balls is one thing... scoring them with the robot as well? Well, that's a large undertaking, and if they did that, they'd probably have to raise the weight limit. (hint hint? 140 pounds next year? )
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Higher weight limit? Why?
Picking up and scoring these balls is nothing new. It was acutally the main challenge of the '00 year game, and scoring the soccerballs in '02. Some teams are acutally quite fantastic at it (95, 175 come to mind, although there are many others). Theres no reason why a 130 pound bot can't score these balls. Sure, it could mean sacrificing some other function, but who says thats a bad thing? Any body can push balls around, but sucking them up and scoring them takes a little finese. My own view: this game seemed to cater to rookie teams a little to much. Lets face it, most teams really did end up with a box with big wheels and a hook. Allowing the bots to score points in more then one way would have really opened up the field a lot more (and yes, there really was only one way to score points with your bot, the multiplyer was dependent on points already scored by your human player). There may have been a lot of things for the 'bot to do, but only one really seemed to matter.
I think the game would have been much, much better if 'bots had been allowed to score the small balls. I still don't understand why they wern't. I'm sure there were good reasons, but none are clear to me. In my view, the human was way way way over involved this year, and it really detracted from the game. This is a contest of robots, not basketball players. I don't really see the reasoning behind having a human player at all anymore. Maybe it gives the rookies some easy points, but is that always a good thing? Yes, the learning curve is steep but so what? FIRST isn't about making things easy, afterall.
-Andy A.