Fully autonomous game

[Hypnotoad]

By defenition, a robot is "A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically." (with google as my witness). Now, Traditionally, FRC "robots" operate on their own for fifteen seconds and are controlled by human operators for the rest of the match. We know that autonomous mode is not often very complex in robots, and the complex task of moving to the feeder station, loading frisbees, finding a suitable firing position, aiming, firing, and later climbing, are not being performed automatically.

What I am getting at is that the machines we build are not "robots", but are instead really fancy RC cars. Now, that doesn't make them any less awesome (these are some REALLY fancy RC cars), but it does make them less... well... robotic.

This is not a problem on the mechanical side of things as whether or not the robot is fully autonomous or not does not affect their learning of CAD, power tools, milling, etc. This does, however, limit the programming because there simply isn't anything to code that the driver and operator won't do better. Why make a PID loop if humans are already the best PID controllers you could have.? Why make vision tracking code when humans are faster than code at lining up shots and firing?

This could be just a personal complaint that only I have, but I want to know from you guys.

So what is keeping us from making our robots fully autonomous as things are right now? If people really want to make autonomous robots why not just make them? Absolute position tracking, or rather lack thereof. The robot cannot on it's own know its exact position. GPS deprived navigation is not even a fully developed military technology yet, let alone tech that our robots can use. If the robot were to know its actual position on the field, both rebound rumble and ultimate ascent would be perfectly playable as is by a fully autonomous robot.

The actual methods of doing this can be discussed on the technical forum if the idea catches on. I suspect a localized gps style system would do the trick quite easily, but there are always multiple ways of doing something.