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Originally Posted by Joe Johnson
I WANTED there to be cappers at the Championships, but it is just too hard given hardware, software and timing the constraints teams are under.
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What really concerns me is that they really did give us good tools this year. Our team has the camera working extremely well. It tracks with amazing reliability both green and yellow. Our primary difficulty is in our robot's design which requires us to approach the tetra from the side, parallel to one of the tetra sides (think about that one for a while... it's really difficult!), and the fact that our practice robot and real robot don't behave the same. Like I suspect is the case for many other teams, our practice robot has capped the center goal dozens of times.
I think this is something FIRST needs to think about. They gave us great tools this year for autonomous, yet basically no one can do it (even if a few manage to make it happen at the championships, it's still essentially 0%). The only way we're going to see better looking autonomous modes in the future is if they can find some way to give the software guys on all these teams some time to work with their real robot. Just like every other team I'm sure, our software team only had a day or two to work with our completed "shipping" robot. If every team had had an additional week to work on software for their competition robot, I think we'd see more capping happen.
I wonder if it would ever be possible for FIRST to add a rule allowing teams to keep their robots for an extra week but only allow software to work on it? Unfortunately, this is probably too unenforceable and would leave a large opportunity for abuse, and would extend the build season which a lot of people are (rightfully) opposed to. Unfortunately I just don't see how else autonomous modes can improve. Anyone have ideas?