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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!

Sounds good to me! I thought that was the definition of FIRST anyway, no matter what degree of technical challenge a team attempted.

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.

Nothing wrong with that. It'll definitely teach them science, engineering, and technology skills!

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?

Don't think I said that. You wouldn't consider full-autonomous as part of building and improving the robot? I would.

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.

It appears that we have a big disconnect on what "fully-autonomous" means. My definition is more in line with the online dictionaries and Wikipedia:

A fully autonomous robot has the ability to

- Gain information about the environment.
- Work for an extended period without human intervention.
- Move either all or part of itself throughout its operating environment without human assistance.
- Avoid situations that are harmful to people, property, or itself unless those are part of its design specifications.

Not sure what your "human sensors" are (voice recognition or real people pressing buttons in the loop?) but in either case, it's still human intervention.

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.

Which is exactly what I was pointing out. Their fully autonomous robot won't have any interaction with their team mates. Maybe that's the new definition of "co-opertition"! No problem if that's what they want, just think about all the ramifications.

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.

Does "highly succesful" mean "uses the highest technology"? I always considered "highly succesful" to mean inspiring young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.

It is a fact of life that not all kids are interested in the programming side of FIRST. Nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with the programmers doing everything they can. Some kids are more interested in the mechanical aspects, some are more interested in the robotic competition aspects. Doesn't FRC still stand for FIRST ROBOTICS COMPETITION ? Nothing wrong with a team sacrificing their competitiveness to demonstrate their programming skills, just make sure that's what the team wants. My personal viewpoint is that sacrificing everything else about FIRST to emphasive a team's programming skills may not be in the best interests of FIRST or the rest of the team.