I'll start this by saying its been a while since I have done any "real" programming. However, I did my masters degree in Robotic Intelligence and have loads of background knowledge here, in biorobotics, communications, etc.
I am excited that teams are considering this. FIRST should be about innovation.
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Originally Posted by efoote868
I say this because having a fully autonomous robot may be *impossible* in 6 weeks, unless of course your team can come up with a 469 strategy
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Originally Posted by Chris Hibner
For the on-topic part: there have been robots in the past that have played significant portions of the match autonomously. I once proposed a system to reward the teams with bonus points based upon how much of the match they played autonomously. I'll have to dig up that old thread and post it.
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Its definitely NOT impossible. Im 99% positive that team 176 did it one of the years (somewhere around 2001??). They didn't use it in every match, and as far as I know they only ran it in practice matches, but boy was it fun to watch their drivers press a button and walk away and see that robot do "its thing". Could it account for every variable? heck no. Was it impressive for the amount it did? YES!!
I've played around with everything from controlling an FRC robot with my bicep muscle to writing up simulation code for a modular robot. Its all about how complex you make the problem. If you start from the highest level and have a robot that can incorporate a lot of sensors, not only for knowing about it's mechanisms, but for "seeing" the world around it, you open up entirely new doors. We have seen plenty of teams be able to do this in tiny pieces - balancing the ramp, scoring tubes, keeping the arm inside the box, running cool auto modes with avoidance detection. A fully automated match is really just as step beyond all of those. Heck there are some FLL teams that can do this, why cant the FRC teams?!?!
It does require big picture and strategic thinking to consider what you might "run into". Do you need to avoid other robots? what do you need to interact with? what are the possible decisions to be made? But teams already do a lot of this type of thing for the 15 second auto modes. No not every team does, but some of the teams do!
Would I suggest using it in Finals? heck no. As already stated, in this competition we aren't going to be able to process like the human brain. But could it be a fun and awesome challenge for a programmer to try for an offseason or even to "show off" in a practice match?? Of course!! And hey if its "really good" you might even get your drivers to run it in one of those "easy" matches.
Stop being afraid of trying things you might "fail" at. Just because something seems impossible, doesn't mean you shouldn't try it. As long as your entire strategy isn't based around it, I would say go for it. Have one set of programmers implement the "normal functions", and have the other go for the full automation.