[gblake]

As long as your definition of a "fully autonomous" robot consists of something on the order of simply finding a game piece and kicking it in the direction of a goal you at least have a chance to be successful. Many of this year's and previous year's robots already do that in autonomous, no big deal to run it for an additional 2 minutes.

How about if they define success as Inspiring and Recognizing Science and Technology excellence? I'm going to bet many folks will want to line up behind that goal!

However, don't expect your robot to do very well in competition. A game designed for completely autonomous robots like FIRST TECH CHALLENGE or FIRST LEGO LEAGUE is much simpler than the games FIRST designs for their top level of competition.

How about if they use this as a tool in competing to earn FIRST's top level of competition's top award? - The Chairman's award.

Remember that you are part of an alliance. Your inability to co-operate with your teammates to maximize each robot's potential would be the equivalent of a football player running whatever play he feels like without co-operating with the rest of the team. Don't expect it to work very well.

I think many FIRST FRC teams invest their time and resources across many fronts, and thast building a "best" robot is only one of them. Almost certainly this reduces their robots' abilities to play the game well (but generally makes them better FIRST teams). Are you saying that investing in any goal that distracts significantly from building and improving the robot should be discouraged?

Using this year's game for an example, how do you in intend to determine whether your robot should be going after a ball or blocking an opposing robot? How do you decide when to come over the bump into the front zone and assist in scoring? How do you decide when to come over the bump into the front zone and block the opposing alliance's blocker bot so your striker can score? How do you know if your alliance partner has moved to the middle and you need to move to the far zone to clear balls from it? If you do decide to block an opposing robot, how do you know it's not dead and you're wasting your time on it? How do you know that your alliance's striker bot is broken down and you need to move forward and score? How do you know both your alliance mates are on their back and you need to flip one back upright to have a chance to get past their blocker bot and score (this happened to us in the semi-finals, we won the game 2-1: http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv...2010la_sf2m2)?

A fully autonomous robot-system can have an interface between itself and the rest of the game participants. For example a human sensor in the driver's station can listen to instructions given by allies and can transfer them to the cRIO part of the system. To keep the project's intent intact these instructions should probably be distilled into a relatively small set of pre-defined messages.

These are just some of the decisions I've made as field coach on our team this year. They're all pretty straight forward and simple, but impossible to make without an overview of the game situation. I'd be interested to hear how you intend to implement any kind of awareness of the tactical situation into your robot. You can pre-program a game plan into it, but without an overall awareness of the game, you'll discover the truth of an old saying that's proved itself through the years: "No plan survives contact with the enemy".

See previous paragraph, and notice that the folks haven't decided to try to create a fully autonomous alliance (yet). They are discussing creating a fully autonomous robot.

I think it's great to inspire people to work towards fully autonomous robots, just don't lose sight of reality. Many of your teammates will probably want to do at least reasonably well at their competions. In the real world, your robot will be a liability to it's alliance.

Perhaps. Or perhaps it will be a huge asset to the program, and all teams in it, because it becomes tangible evidence that FIRST is highly successful; and the resulting robot(s) consequently become an excellent inspirational tool.

Blake
PS: I haven't forgotten that this would/will be a very hard job. Nor have I changed my mind about spending more than one season helping a dedicated group of students eat this elephant one bite a time.