[Peter Johnson]

Originally Posted by GGCO

Very interesting.
How about create an award -- one that will get you to Nationals (or a lot of pts if you're in Michigan) -- where you have to demonstrate that your auton works and gets the job done. This would be seen on the field. You'd also have to present your code for a code review and explain any development practices (agile, etc)/tools (git/svn, etc) you used.

I think that would encourage teams to not only write clever code, but also write it in a professional manner.

Along the same lines, how about something similar to what VEX has added to their competitions: an autonomous challenge run in parallel with the normal competition? Basically the idea is to run fully autonomous for 1-2 minutes, no other robots on the field, possibly with modified game rules and/or starting conditions. The winner of the challenge is the robot which scores the most points. The winner also gets a ticket to the championships. In VEX a team may have unlimited attempts to maximize their score, but I think that's excessive (allows luck to dominate)... maybe 5 attempts? How challenging this is would depend on the game design, of course.