New Sensors?

[Bryce Paputa]

This probably isn't very feasible, but what I would love to see is a grid of weight sensors under the field that could tell your robot where all of the other robots were. Then i would have a 10-15 second autonomous period, followed by a minute of optional autonomous, if your robot stayed autonomous in this period you would get a bonus on each item scored. The game would have to be noncooperative as the weight sensors would not tell you the alliance of the robot. I think that it would be practical to have a fully autonomous robot in this minute period without too huge of a score bonus and while it might be hard to explain to spectators, it would definitely draw middle leveled team's attention to the control system. I've noticed that the most amazing teams always have a basically perfect autonomous program, 1114 in 2008, 67 in 2012, 254 this year, and I think most teams don't think about this as much as they should early in the design stage (I know my team hasn't). I doubt any of this will happen, but it would be pretty cool in my opinion.