[steven114]

Not exactly true - if you have switches (such as dip switches) you can set them before autonomous mode. While your robot is sitting disabled on the field, you can read in the states and save them. Durning autonomous mode they will read as all disabled, but you can refer to the saved state and make decisions. We used this to select between autonomous modes. They were numbered from zero to fifteen, and you would poke in the right value onto a bank of four dip switches. Before the match, the controller would read them in and store them. During autonomous, it would then change programs based on what we had chosen.