Future of Autonomous Mode

[LauraN]

Originally Posted by FadyS.

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.

Neural nets? Whoa, calm down. =)

Isn't sending input to the robot also part of the challenge? I mean, I guess you could argue that your input would be coming from the outputs of your program, but still...

15 seconds is a pretty good length of time for autonomous mode. It can either be a really long amount of time or a really short amount of time, depending on what your robot can (or can't) do. It's a good amount of time to let the teams with the resources and abilities to show off some cool stuff, while not leaving some of the less experienced teams in the dust.

I'm sure plenty of people would love to work with things that "sophisticated," but sometimes it's good to remember that simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication. The definition of true innovation is something that accomplishes a task or solves a problem in the simplest way possible.

And that's what we're all going for, right?

I mean, isn't efficiency the main goal of everyone's robot?