Complete Autonomous Robot

[magnets]

This has popped up in the past before, and while I'm a huge fan of trying to automate different things the driver must do (climb, shoot/reload, balance, hang...), I don't see a fully autonomous robot being possible with any of the previous games(but we have yet to see the 2014 game).

Lets take an average fully autonomous robot. It would have to know where it is on the field to get from the pyramid to the feeder station. There isn't an easy way to do this. Teams have used follower wheels, but they slip and aren't accurate over an entire match. From experience, you're not going to get rotational accuracy over an entire match with just a gyro. If you go for the acceleromter/gyro/magnetometer combo, you'll be +/- 15 degrees at the end of the match. That being said, I'm sure there are creative solutions to these problems that a FRC team can find, it's just a matter of finding them.

Creating a fully autonomous robot is a really, really ambitious project, and you should make sure your team is on board with the plan. On the team I've been with, the controls team has two rules, as simple as possible, and if the driver can be trained to do it faster than we can program it, then the driver does it.