[Adam Y.]

I see a lot of posts here seeming to imply that students are not capable of designing (with mentor help), and programming a functional autonomous bot. I flatly disagree. Our robot doesn't do much during autonomous this year.. but that isn't because we couldn't get it to work. It was because we couldn't get it to work in the time we had: autonomous wasn't given enough of an emphasis.

In my opinion, it's just too much information if you try and design a autonomous robot. You are now trying to throw another subject on top of learning a computer language. Learning how to program and learning how to program a robot are two completely differnt areas.

Autonomous should be about variety and options. Thats how the real world works, right?

Well to be honest the real world doesn't cater to us like FIRST which would mean that there would be no infared or any disernable color blobs. Also, sensors are gaurenteed to have problems/fail. This situation actually happened last year with the infared reflecting all over the place. This question relates to the above quote. Is six weeks enough time to design and use the right sensors? I feel we would start approaching the informational limit for most high school students which I was taught to avoid as an engineer.