Fully autonomous robots?

[SoftwareBug2.0]

Originally Posted by Mike

I was thinking about how, this year, FIRST has shifted autonomous into user controlled mode. I foresee that many robots will be a hybrid of both technologies. User-controlled driving and autonomous-controlled shooting. Now, what if you programmed in an object avoidance system? What if you programmed your robot to try to evade all large objects (robots) coming at it and pick up all small objects (balls)? This pretty much eliminates all the necessity for a driver during offense.

So, the focus of this thread is:
Do you think an offensively autonomous robot is feasible?
If so, do you think it would be competitive?
If not feasible, why not? What specific function could a robot do that a human could not?

The reason that it won't work is that there's sort of a hierarchy of what gets done:
1)Mechanical
2)Basic Driving Code
3)Basic autonomous mode
4)Telemetry
5)Advanced autonomous code.

Most teams only get to stage 2 or 3. In six weeks, there's just not enough time to make such a system work more reliably than a human driver.