Future of Autonomous Mode

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Originally Posted by 10intheCrunch

I know FIRST isn't supposed to be fair, but autonomous mode as it is out of reach for many teams.

FIRST IS meant to be fair. Team 1241 showed us at GLR that a Rookie can do just as well as veteran teams. They had an amazing design and idea. Obviously veteran teams are doing well with awesome designs as well. Autonomous mode is simply something else that teams can use to show off their designs and strategies. We can't look away from the fact that some teams have more engineers than others. This will make their robot do more things in the game, but a specialized robot can do just as well as a robot that can do everything.
In respects to the goal of FIRST and the competitions, it is meant to be very fair. I hate it when people say FIRST isn't fair. We have been a team without any engineers for all 6 of our years as a team. Our students have always designed and built the robots by themselves. We even managed to win Midwest and Newton last year. It all comes down to strategy and how hard the students want to work.