[Billfred]

Here's what I've thought up:

The field is approximately the same size as before, with the same ol' 3v3. The robots are within a couple of inches of their present size, though not 28x38 just to mess with the heads of folks.

Around the field are several trash cans filled with a mix of 8.5" and 13" playground balls. (For those who aren't familiar, 8.5" balls are your standard four-square balls; 13" balls were last seen in FIRST Frenzy.) Teams score points by placing the 8.5" balls in their cage at the end of the field; the cage is roughly the height of the aluminum on the player station walls with a shakeable top (think spiders from Rack 'N' Roll) with appropriately-sized holes to allow teams to dump a can's contents onto it and shake the smaller balls down below.

Along the side of the field are several robot-sized protrusions from the wall to form human player zones, one per team. Anything within these zones, save for robots (which start from them), may be manipulated by the human players as they see fit. (I figure this might offer a degree of protection relative to the last time we saw human players this close to robots.)

To provide an appropriate incentive for an autonomous routine, some of those trash cans will be colored red and blue with enough markings (or lighting, if you want to get something that works with the CMUcam as a safety) that a robot can distinguish them. Teams will receive points for each of their bins that have not tipped at the end of the autonomous period, and more points for those that have not tipped at the end of the match. (I imagine sensors can tell you when these bins have tipped.) If you want to be a softy, offer lesser points for bins that are merely upright at the end of each period. For the real carrot, offer teams a single point for leaving the human player zone under their own command. Once they've opened up the programming software to get their freebie point, hopefully they'll continue fiddling around with it.

In the middle of the field is a bar, approximately 30" off the ground. Teams receive points from hanging from this bar at the end of the match; in addition, the bar serves as a nice irritation for teams trying to transport trash cans without tipping them.

Any team can rattle the cage, knock over trash cans, and move trash cans into the human player zones for them to cherry-pick the small balls for scoring. Better teams will be able to hang, move the balls directly over to the cage, and will have some way of rejecting the 13" balls to keep their cage's top clear. Beatty and Simbotics will hang, have ways of extracting the balls from bins without tipping them, sorting balls onboard the robot, depositing the large balls onto the opposing cage, and clearing out space atop their own to guarantee a hole to deposit theirs.

You'll notice I haven't made mention about penalties; the only ones you'd want to call would involve interfering with human players. I'm trying to figure out a best practice that would allow human players to manipulate things left inside the human player zone without having to disable their robot as in 2005. A pressure pad that creates a no-robot's land when unoccupied would be a valid approach. (Human player steps off, lights turn on to signal the refs to watch. Or if FIRST has a bunch of money in its budget for field construction, a gate that pops up to block robots would do as well.)

You couldn't play this tomorrow, but I think the concept is on track.