I don't think we will see FIRST support neural networks in the near future. However, I do think that we might start seeing teams try them out on their own, if they find they are useful.
A reasonably sized network would easily run on the cRIO, for some definitions of reasonably sized. However, I'd be hard-pressed to find a way to train the network safely and quickly.
I co-authored a
paper or
two on neural networks designed for "long term" memory tasks. Our NN was written in Java, and the execution time of a single net was quick enough to run on a cRIO. However, we took tens of thousands of generations to evolve our solutions. Granted, our particular network was extremely flexible and therefore slower to evolve, but this would be a significant hurdle for a team. Using a less powerful network would converge quicker, but then it would be less powerful... Handcoding the network is possible, but really defeats the purpose: an ANN is supposed to teach itself tasks that you wouldn't be able to code yourself.