[JimGRobot]

This thread may belong somewhere else, but I will start it here...
I sent an email to Dean Kamen, or whoever reads his mail, about this topic, but decided today that this forum would be a good place to start talking about this.

Short Version: Should we promote some way to create a separate award for autonomous scoring so we can have a serious challenge without tilting the "playing field" too much?

Long Version: Last year, robots that could score well during autonomous operation could determine the outcome of the game. The challenge was difficult, and deserved the reward of a high score, but I think this was an "unfair" advantage over the robots that could score well, just not during autonomous ops.

Contrasted with this year, the challenge was equally difficult, but hanging a Keeper had little impact on the outcome of the game. I suspect that this was by design to even out the competition a little bit, but that is only a guess.

I would like to see a way to make the autonomous ops really count for something so that more teams might give it a serious try. However, I think that it should be somewhat detatched from the scoring of the matches. One way would be to have a separate award for the high autonomous scoring robots, and not have it be part of the match scoring at all. Another would be to have one element of, or a portion of, the autonomous scoring apply to the main match.

Just something to think about during the off-season... ;-)