What makes FRC a sport?

[JamesBrown]

Originally Posted by Laaba 80

An athlete is a person by definition, but this definition was created far before robots were capable of being "athletes". In breakaway, the robot must move, possess the ball, shoot the ball, pass the ball, etc all on its own power. The same things a human soccer "athlete" must do. Race cars and bikes are both for the sole purpose of transporting the person in the sport, they dont also need to interact with a ball, or whatever other game piece. I guess we can agree to disagree.

Put an FRC robot on a field by itself, no human driving it, what will it do? Robots are still not capable of being athletes, the most sophisticated robots in the world are capable of playing games with varying degrees of success, FRC robots are not even capable of that. Without a human driver there were no robots in breakaway that could be considered athletes, they are really just machines. We are decades away from anything close to a machine that can reason and function well enough to force us to examine our definition of an athlete.