[Bongle]

For the people saying "we need to wait a few years for teams to get caught up with autonomous modes", I don't think that'll ever happen. By the very nature of a high school competition, in any given year, a certain substantial percentage of FRC teams will be in a building/rebuilding/starting/learning phase that will prevent them from being able to perform solidly autonomously. If you wait for that churn to finally end and for most teams to be able to do a competitive autonomous mode, you're going to be waiting forever.

Also, perhaps Rack 'n Roll left a poor impression on people's confidence in many teams' autonomous abilities: when the reward is quite low (2005, 2007) and the difficulty is extremely high (2005, 2007), you're going to have boring autonomous periods. In games like Aim High, even if you couldn't get balls in the goal, you could still prevent others from doing so with small amounts of effort. In Stack Attack, you could conceivably knock over your opponent's pre-built stacks if you couldn't navigate to the central stack.


Anyway, I'd LOVE an end-of-game autonomous (EOGA) in 2009 (when I'll be able to mentor), and here are my responses to common arguments:
It's too hard for most teams - If the challenge is simply "starting from outside <location>, get to <location>", then driver training and a dead-reckoning mode would be sufficient, and that can be done by any team. More sophistication could allow for experienced teams to navigate to <location> from farther away via camera.
It's dangerous for the robot - That's what the driver's E-Stop is for.
It's dangerous for humans - That's what the ref's E-Stop (they have one, right?) is for.
The robot might be damaged - If you know of the damage beforehand, hit the E-Stop during the pause that I presume would occur before EOGA. If you do not know beforehand, then I don't see how 15 seconds of autonomous would be more damaging to your robot than 15 seconds of human-operated play. In both cases, as soon as you see the robot damaging itself, you stop it from doing so (either via E-Stop or just stopping what you're doing).
Other robots might get in the way - That currently happens in the current autonomous anyway. In 2003, 2004, 2006, and to some extent 2007, autonomous modes could result in full-throttle collisions.