[efoote868]

Personally, I would like to see a longer, more meaningful autonomous period, perhaps 20-30 seconds, along with a better goal. This year, we programmed an autonomous, but once our robot was in perfect condition, the team didn't want to see us breaking the robot (with several matches, other robots got entangled with the rack, and spent the rest of the match untangling). Hopefully I'll be able to convince them to use it at IRI...

This year, the autonomous (IMHO) looked lucrative, if you got it right, you could place a spoiler on your opponent's side, making it nearly impossible for them to get easy rows. Its just our programmers never got the robot until near the end of week 4, and even then we had to wire, re-wire, and re-re-wire (ending in a nightmarish tangled mess).

Although we didn't get to use autonomous, we did however make the robot much more like a robot... whenever our antlers were empty, it would turn on its kicker wheel, and be ready to pick up tubes... when it got a tube, it automatically went to the previous height specified... when it got near the rack, it popped the tube onto it. Next year we'll do that... and hopefully for years to come we'll do that.