Fully autonomous game

[Joe G.]

For FRC to achieve its culture changing goals, the competitions must be exciting and accessible for the general public. This means that someone who is not well-versed in the technologies involved in the robots should be able to walk into a competition and be immediately impressed by the task. Of course, one wants to preserve the opportunity for students to learn advanced engineering concepts. But raising the minimum acceptable performance by creating autonomous games would result in many more "failed robots" than you see today, and lowering the bar enough to make the game more autonomous friendly would ruin the spectacle.

A good example of what I mean is Lunacy. It's not a very popular game. I think a big reason why is that it crippled FRC robots' potential. Here we have these sophisticated machines, with industrial control systems and drive trains capable of precision maneuvering, and then we cripple them by making them slide around out of control on a slick surface and slick wheels. Those of us who bury ourselves neck-deep in the robots know all about the intricate details of the challenge, and the impressive things top teams came up with to operate as well as they did, like fans and follower wheels. But to the casual observer, a lunacy robot manuvering was simply not an impressive thing to watch, especially when compared to robots that climb a pyramid or shoot basketballs or launch a track ball.


Sidenote: Lunacy was also the last FRC game to encourage autonomous interaction with your opponents. In theory it sounded like it should have worked like it did in the game animation, with robots chasing each other using vision code. In practice, it resulted in 6-way collisions at the center of the field 90% of the time, with the occasional robot dead reckoning over to a loading station, and practically no reliable autonomous scorers. Even with no interaction from 2010-on, autonomous mode has been much more exciting since the mid-field lines started appearing in the rulebook.


The simple truth is, FRC consists of complex robots built by teams of high schoolers in six week periods, and plenty of teams struggle with it already the way it is. Demanding that these robots match the performance of cutting edge professional robots may increase the technical learning opportunities for some, but would push many away from the sport, and make getting interested in it even more difficult.

[Pault]

I would argue that there are some robots who fulfill this definition, from this year some automatic cimbers (as in I push a button and all of the sudden my robot is a the top of the pyramid) and floor pickups preformed complex series of actions throughout the match.

But if we went fully autonomous, it would take the excitement out of everything. There is so much more uncertainty when a human element is in play. Changing stratgies, defense, and imperfect driving all add to what distinguishes FIRST as a competition instead of a science fair. If it wasn't for the drivers, coach, and human player, people could easily predict every match and be right about it 95% of the time.

[Jon Stratis]

I would challenge your definition of a robot. What I get from dictionary.com:

a machine that resembles a human and does mechanical, routine tasks on command.

Our robots may not always resemble humans, but they DO perform routine tasks on command - simply driving forward on command could be considered to meet this part of the definition, even if that's all the robot does.

For your point of trying to go fully autonomous... Attempting to create something fully autonomous that can react appropriately to random events (ie other robots) in its surroundings is hard. Really hard. I don't care how good of a programming team you have, there's pretty much no way you'll beat a driver with just 6 weeks of design and programming.

That said, I always encourage teams to automate as much as is reasonable. For example, this year my team's climbing mechanism was as close to fully autonomous as you could get - manual lining up and triggering, and a safety release to stop it in mid-motion if needed, but once it started lifting there was no human feedback to keep it going from one level to the next. This was really only possible because we could be sure of there being no "random" interference from other robots during the process!

And localized GPS isn't a perfect solution, either. A couple of years ago I watched a college/post-college autonomous snow plow competition, and many of the competitors utilized localized GPS to help guide their robots. Despite this (and the fact that they had much longer to work on the robots AND much less complex robots - ie a drivetrain with a blade in front - than we do), no competitor performed perfectly. They all missed some area of the pre-planned course. They all wandered off course a bit and had to be manually reset.

Also, consider years where there is no way to know ahead of time where the game pieces will be at any point in the match. They aren't always fed in from a slot, whose location and orientation is known. Sometimes (quite often, actually) they're bouncing around the field and have to be tracked down. robot position for that doesn't matter - vision tracking of moving objects is. In fact, the only real constant we've had (except for Lunacy) in the past few years or so is goals - they seem to always have some sort of vision target available, which really is all a robot should need to line itself up to score appropriately. But even doing that much is incredibly difficult to do in the code.

[ebarker]

This looks like a thread from a few years ago all over again. Back then, If memory serves me well, Dave Lavery piped in and presented the definition of a 'robot'. Bottom line is that robots are not necessarily autonomous.