[Radical Pi]

Originally Posted by 45Auto

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

Probably not the idea of the other people wanting to participate in this, but I don't think a "full autonomous" robot is a good target. A "Human-assisted autonomous" (like hybrid mode?) is a more reasonable target for competition use IMO. In my limited memory of the mars rovers, I remember that even they weren't "fully autonomous". To compensate for the immense lag in transmissions between earth and mars, the human operators on earth would send out high-level commands, and then the rover implements the commands autonomously, doing things such as avoiding rocks in it's path while moving. That's exactly what would be useful in one of these competitions.

Imagine walking to the field with a control board that is one switch: score or block. These tasks are all autonomous, it's just the human operators tell the bot whether to kick that ball or to pin that bot. I'd still call this an excellent project if that was where it went