Fully autonomous robots?

[nehalita]

(oh dear this is a long one. bear with me, i actually supported my statements so that's why it's long...)

Our team was actually talking about a possible hybrid of autonomous code and the use of drivers.

Ideally, a combination of both would make the robot more competitive. With the target far away, shooting at an angle could be more difficult than anticipated (this may not be true...obviously, we don't have a working robot that can shoot in the goal and drive around yet so this has yet to be determined). If we can use some autonomous code that automatically tracks the goal and provides the proper angle of inclination or speed, some human error can be eliminated.

However, I started off with "ideally" for a reason. The code has to be able to be properly developed, used, and corrected in time.

I personally feel that a fully autonomous robot would not be nearly as competitive. An autonomous robot doesn't have the awareness of its surroundings that we do looking across the field. What I like so much about this year's game is the amount of strategy needed. You cannot teach a robot strategy....at least not in the amount of time we are allotted.

I'm not saying that an autonomous robot isn't functionable but to be competitive, I still think we need a human touch -- that means the ease of going between offensive and defensive strategies and ensuring that no one gets in each other's way. Now, we still have that problem when we are controlling the robot (getting in each other's way) but we can easily fix that. To conjure a code that would anticipate all elements, possibilities, and problems into account would simply be illogical and impractical when, given our complex decision-making faculties, humans can do the same thing with a lot less effort.

Finally, I would like to point out that there are 3 of us on the field while there is one camera on the robot. We can decide what to do when a robot rams into us and figure out where to go next, the robot cannot. We can determine whether the corner goal is free alot faster than the robot can and if a robot needs help up the ramp, we can do that while an autonomous robot cannot see whether a robot needs help or not (or decide which robot to help in the even that both robots cannot go up the ramp). it cannot assess which robot would be easier to aid and even if we could devise a code to do that, it would be easier for a human to simply take 1/2 second to figure that out than spend several hours coding it into a robot.

So essentially, autonomous code can take out the guesswork but we still need humans to decide what's best to do next. If this games was 1 vs. 1, things would be different but we have 6 robots. Versatility is essential.