Future of Autonomous Mode

[FadyS.]

I've been looking at all the videos from the regionals and I'm very disappointed with the quality of autonomous mode. In the real world, in a manufacturing plant, robots are expected to work autonomously doing repetitive routines throughout the day. Successfully programming an autonomous mode is a part of the process of engineering a robot. When will we be able to use a Pentium 4 level processor for the robot? In fact, maybe they should let us interface the robot microprocessor with the PC so that the PC does all the processing and sends back data to the robot processor on what it would like the bot to do. We are currently stuck with very primitive sensors. If only we could mount a couple of webcams and use a PC-class processor, the sky would be the limit for autonomous mode. In fact, you could play the entire match in autonomous mode if you could use webcams. At that point, it would purely be a matter of programming. You could use neural nets and heuristic algorithms and other pattern recognition techniques to understand the situation on the playing field and to have the robot react accordingly. The robot would be able to learn over time as its neural net weights evolve. That would be my dream come true. I would love to try to program something that sophisticated. Digital sensors and even the analog sensors don't tell you much. On the other hand if your robot is processing realtime video, the sky is the limit. When do you think FIRST bots will be doing that? In 5 years? 10 years maybe?

EDIT: Yes, I do realize this is a high school level competition but there are a lot of very very talented young programmers out there who can do this and much more.