[Tom Schindler]

Autonomous mode has to be a task that is generally easy to complete-- both this year, and last year satisfied that requirement. Knocking a ball off of the post, or hitting a giant stack of bins is "relatively" easy to get a robot to do autonomously.

The game needs to keep this "ease" of play, but add a new element. What if, the alliances were randomly selected by the computer, so you did not know if you were red or blue until the match started. The field was also in a sort of "random" setup. The robots could have a "dead reckoning program", but it might knock off the wrong ball, or hit the wrong stack.

If a game used two different colored balls, use of sensors could allow a robot to detect which color balls you are touching, would make the autonomous task quite a bit more interesting. This would also still allow for rookie teams to design dead reckoning programs that just suck up any color ball at random, and the drivers can later decide what to do with them.


Also--

What about moving autonomous to the end of the match? That way there is no way of knowing where you are starting at the beginning of autonomous. This could still allow rookie teams to use "dead reckoning", but their drivers would have to be disciplined enough to get back to a certain spot on the field before the start of autonomous.

Just throwing a few ideas on the table..

Tom Schindler