In general, I am not a huge fan of Automony in FIRST games. It tends to to a bit boring since nothing happens much of the time. I after 2 years I still have yet to see a robot do anything worthwhile in the final 5 seconds of the autonomous period. Making it longer is not a good idea.
I do think that Autonomy gives great advantge to teams with good programmers. I think that autonomy can have a nice place in FIRST games if properly applied.
I think that FIRST should make autonomy optional in the following way:
Each driver station has a button which causes the robot to exit autonomous mode when it is pressed. At the beginning of the game, robots will automatically enter autonomous activation. For each second that a team remains in autonomous, they recieve a bonus. As soon as they press their button, normal driver mode begins and the bonuses stop acruing. This way, teams that have great programmers may be able to rack up a big bonus right away, other teams who have no programmers may be able to forgo any bonus in order to utilize this time in some other way. I think this would add an interesting element of tension to the opening seconds of the game. The length of the total allowable autonomous period could be limited if desired to limit the maximum bonus.
In terms of sensors....we do not have enough budget or allowable electonics sources to do all we desire to do. In 2004 I bought a gyro, two encoders and a few potentiometers and I used up my electonics budget. Good parts cost more than we can afford. Why not just include electonics under the $3500 cost umbrella and not have a separate cost limit? It's not as if spending $1000 on electronics will help you win, you still have to know how to apply the technology and have a good robot to use it on. We have source deregulation on mechanical components, why are we restricted to only 3 electronic sources. They are good sources but they really don't carry any robot specific hardware. Amateur robotics is actually quite a large industry and there are many companies which make things which would be perfect for FIRST teams, if only we were allowed to buy them. Check out
www.robot-electronics.co.uk ,
www.totalrobots.com,
www.active-robots.com
A few key parting points:
1. Autonomy does not have to mean driving around. Any machine function which is self regulating is "autonomous". Some of we old timers have had autonomous features on our robots for many years, long before the past two years of "forced autonomy". Often, automating a function is the best engineering solution as it eliminates the variablity of the driver and can make up for limited practice time. Whether balancing a bridge, climbing on a puck, or knocking a ball off of a Tee; automated ways of performing such actions is and always will be the best choice whether "forced autonomy" remains in the game or not.
2. Time based movement is NOT autonomy. In order to be deemed autonomous, robots must be making decisions on what to do all by themselves using inputs from sensors and control routines. Simply turning on the drive motors for a few seconds in order to run some sort of pattern is basically "point and shoot". No decisions are made by the computer once the routine is begun, thus it is not "autonomous".