Quote:
Originally Posted by oddjob
... or a high scoring match. Who'd pay to watch robotically driven NASCAR or robot tennis? Not many. Even the Mars rovers are driven by commands sent from Earth, with some autonomy build in to the rover. (human said what?).
A fully autonomous FIRST competition would be a dud. It's technically brilliant, but has a very limited audience. Adding some automated tasks to human control does make sense though, such as camera assisted aiming and shooting mechanisms. In Formula 1 car racing the FIA is constantly having to evaluate how much of the car is to be driven by computer versus having the driver in control. They understand the fans want to see the drivers perform too, it's not just about who has the best engineers. The same applies to FIRST.
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If the robots are fully autonomous, then the issue becomes how well they interact with human players. The actions of human players and robots can have zero overlap, in contrast to the direct competition present in 2009.
I feel there is a limited vision of the individuality of autonomous robots, and an assumption that fully autonomous robots will make every match the same. If the robots are very repeatable, then make the field environment less predictable. Perhaps Guinea Pigs in exercise balls that robots must collect?
RC cars are not the future of robotics. I don't understand how we can get students interested in new engineering fields if we don't expose them to it.