[russell]

I personally strongly support a game dominated by autonomous mode. The competition in which we are currently engaged is often reffered to as "FRC" which stands for FIRST Robotics Competition. This would imply a competition in which robots compete. However if you read the thread linked above, or browse the programming forum you will find that the competition this year (and remember back to last year too) is nothing more than a remote control car building and driving contest. While this might be more interesting for some (spectators mainly), it makes the competition seem to be almost a fraud. I know that my club was founded as the "West Robotics Organization" rather than a FIRST team, and we joined FIRST because we needed a task. But we have recently discovered that for far less money we could build a robot based around a PC running linux, that would be very nearly infinitely more capable of autonomous operation than any FIRST robot, and for this reason this may be our last year participating in FIRST. While I have mixed feelings about this (I love almost everything about FIRST except for the lack of autonomous), I do have to say that at the current rate I will have to welcome a change.