Well, first off, sorry if the public service announcement
sounded too sam eagle like.
On the whole autonomous thing, for your convinience here's some video of our robot running in lap-mode:
>In competition:
one,
two, and
three.
>In pre-season test:
video
>After a recent fix-it (with competition bot gearing and no lane changes, this can make seven lines):
video (turn your volume up and you can hear the motors... sounds great!),
video with people playing mean and shoving the robot around.
In the last two videos there, if you look you can see the claw opening and closing on it's own. This is because the practice robot has no knock-off bar like the competition robot does. To illustrate when the knockoff bar would be up and down, we opened/closed the claw. Also, once we get our robocoach board installed on the competition robot we have the ability to lane-change in order to knock off the ball regardless of which lane it's in. Of course, lane-changing adds distance to your run, so going for a lane three ball from lane one will cost you a line or two so you get about 5 lines and 2 balls instead of six to seven and two if you're on the inside track the whole way round.
After we overhaul the drivetrain thursday morning (it has over 75,000ft on it
) we should be all up and ready to go.
AR-CHE-ME-DES! 
-q