[Kevin Sevcik]

As you've said, there's a large lack of programming going into all of our bots. I think this is primarily because it's just so hard to do anything useful in 6 weeks. You said you and a team of others spent two months programming a robot this summer. Full time. FIRST has 6 weeks of working after school. I personally am amazed that any teams out of the 1000 managed to do anything useful with the very finicky CMU Cam.

That said, there's obviously still room for some programming on the robots. I wanted to introduce my team to the wonders of feedback control, but I was sorely needed for just getting a robot built. As you also noted, it's very easy to spend lots of time programming. Having a well programmed robot that's not built is a bit of a problem, obviously. And many teams are hurting just for mechanical mentors and getting a robot built, period.

I suppose I'm sounding like a bit of a downer. I really like programming and digital controls and all, but I think there's only so much that can be done with a team of high school students and 6 weeks, short of mentors writing the the entire program themselves and just showing it to the kids. Expecting teams to design, build, and program a highly adaptable machine vision system in 6 weeks seems a bit much to me.