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Originally Posted by Turtlecoach
This has been an impressive thread with all the speculation as to how this IR board will be used. Here is my two cents. Think about what FIRST has always done...they want the teams to develop solutions to problems. NASA eventually wants to put up bases on the Moon & Mars. You need robots working together to make that happen. I bet that the KOP will contain an IR transmitter that will mount on the robot along with this receiver. Robots on the field are going to have to work together to accomplish a task such as a coordinated lift. Four outputs - UP, DOWN, FORWARD, BACK come to mind. The instructions for setting up with a TV remote are so you can test the bot before competition. The white plug would be for regional programming when you bring the robot up for inspection so everyone has the same "learned" program. The LED's on the board would be for diagnostics when checking the bot out during the build and confirming the programming at the regionals. Most likely wrong, but its a thought.
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Earlier this fall, as FIRST was releasing information, I was surprised at the number of times they addressed "collaboration". Taking your NASA idea to a more present engineering achievement, consider the International Space Station. This is an Engineering task that must be coordinated between teams of engineers very distant from each other, yet the separate components must match up in space, or their efforts will be wasted.
BIG WHAT IF . . .
What if FIRST provided a docking ring and collar system in the KOP, and teams had to build both a drive system and an actuator assembly that could be separated by using this docking system.
Then at competitions, teams would not only play together, but would have to use the drive from one team with the actuator from another. You could have 2 robots vs 2 robots matches and increase each alliance to 4 teams (8 teams per match). Teams would only play with half their robot, and they could mix and match among the alliance to get the best fit of robots.
It would be very difficult, but by encouraging collaboration, it would mimic a current engineering task.