[Chris is me]

So on one hand, you're trying to tell programmers to be realistic about their skill sets and what they can accomplish, but in te same breath you're saying that as a student with a few years of programming experience, you can achieve what computer scientists work on for years in a 6 week build window?

I really don't like killing childhood dreams or anything like that, but let's take this year's game as an example. I'll even let you pretend you have 1114's robot so you have as much technical capability as possible. Take an empty field. There are 3 balls on it. Which one should the robot drive toward? How accurately can you get the ball's position? What if it rolls away out of camera view? Now add other robots, how do you pick the ball that is least likely to be knocked away by a defender? How do you account for the slipping of drive wheels and being pushed sideways, accurately enough that you're not at an insurmountable disadvantage to anyone with eyes?

It's an enormous task, and while taking enormous challenges is a load of fun, are you really going to suck up your team's resources, time, and effort for your own personal goal? Perhaps if you're interested in AI, you can start simpler and scale up. Making a simple 2v2 grid and turn based game of Breakaway that you could work on AI algorithms for would be very interesting, still extremely hard, and isolated from your team's on field performance. If you like sensor work, there's still autonomous mode, or you could automate portions of teleoperated play like hanging.