[nathanww]

One one the things about this year's setup that I thought was cool is how you can query the FMS and get information about things like your alliance. What this made me wonder though, is about obtaining other information. It seems to me that the major barrier to developing some very cool expert systems, automatic strategy-processors, etc. is the lack of information such as "how many points has the blue alliance scored" or "Where is the nearest opposing robot". For our team, at least, that means that the robot's ability to operate autonomously remains limited to robot "internals"--i.e., the robot can track a target, but has to be told where and when to do it. This is turn means that most of this "tactical-level" processing has to be done by the human drivers, which is obviously not a perfect process.

The way that we're trying to solve this is by employing our drivers as extremely sophisticated sensors who input information during the match, so it can be interpreted by an expert system designed during the strategizing sessions. However, it seems like this would duplicate a lot of the data the FMS already collects, such as real-time scoring. What would be really useful would be for the robot to be able to accsess RTS and possibly other data, such as robot positions on the field. Obviously, some parts of this could be game specific, but it could be designed to use a number of flexible "channels" so that FIRST could publish specifications about how to use the system for any particular game.