[Adam Y.]

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.

Errrr... I don't know what you are talking about. You can build a very capable robot that works using the controls that First provided that works solely using an autonomous mode. Not to mention you have to buy sensors, motors, and pretty much everything else. In the end you are probably going to end up spending the same amount that you will with First depending on what you want the robot to do. First robots fall under a form of robotics known as teleoperated robotics. Teleoperated robotics combine both human control and robotic control. You may be wondering what robotic control is there during driving mode but it is there. When you have a compressor on the robot it's acting on it's own, dipswitches, and pots are also forms of teloperated control. So why hasn't someone gone beyond that. Who knows? To go beyone anything teleoperated would just be to complicated for a highschool student not to mention would really complicate the design of the game. I never liked this years autonomous code because it forces you to use the camera in order to detect the tetras.