[Dan Richardson]

This years autonomous mode is quite the challenge, It takes a solid mechanical bot and a extraordinary programming team. I'm not under the impression however that an additional 5 seconds will do anything to help out the process. There are very few teams that are " Just Missing " consistently, don't get me wrong they are out there.. but there aren't too many. If you add 5 seconds there are still gonna be those just misses.

With the extra 5 seconds I believe all you are going to be adding is an additional 5 seconds of announcers making things up to say. The task was difficult this year and the problem is, unlike last year, there is no simple task to complete. If you could not find the target last year you could just do guess work, point your bot at the target and shoot. If you were a low ball scorer it was even better. Just a drive straight code for 5 seconds and release your balls.

I believe we really just need more effective preparation for the season. Teams need to have in their repertoire built and tested code for each one of the sensor packages, so that what ever may be the most important for that particular year and your particular robot. A programming team needs as much time if not more than a mechanical team. Robotics is a programming intensive field, and thats hard to say for a Mechanical Engineer in training who has a desire to go into a Robotics Field. The beauty of it is that you can bench test most of these sensors without even needing the huge robot. You can get your team to use vex, or the practice bot or even just a piece of cardboard with wheels and a motor attached to the cpu and your able to build the code. After 5 weeks playing with vex robots, the mechanical team handed our programmers the bot and in just about 2 day ( 1 day of calibrating sensors, and 1 day of actual programing ) they had the bot running autonomous.

I know its hard for this to happen, and it seems like mostly only larger teams who are even able to cap in autonomous effectively, the same argument is always made from the Mechanical End " Well they build at GM, or they build at NASA, of they have 1231232 CNC Machines. " But programming is the area where the mediocre robot can make up in their competitiveness. I know I know, this years autonomous may be not worth as much or some people think its " too short " but what about autonomous sub routines, or ease of driver use by pre-programmed positions, all of these things are extraordinary successes from a programming point of view.

So in conclusion I don't believe autonomous needs to be longer, If your drive team can cap a tube that it starts with in under 15 seconds, your robot should autonomously be able to as well. In fact I'm of the impression and will make the argument that your robot should quite possibly even do it faster/more efficiently than your drive team. Hehe I know this would rarely happen but I'd love to see this competition get to that point. If your robot can't cap under 15 seconds well than, maybe in your case 5 extra seconds is a valid argument from a purely programming point of view. Otherwise, work on it and develop it, just because it may not happen during the season, that does not mean its not a success. Success, at least within the realm of this competition, comes when you complete the challenge, and if you can learn to complete a challenge as hard as this one, I guarantee you'll be able to complete nearly anything thrown your way throughout your academic and your professional career.