[Official 2007 Game Design] Autonomy And Other Technology Discussions

[Donut]

Originally Posted by Dave Scheck

Adding on to what Pete brought up...what if there were 3 seperate start times? Maybe give the hard task 20 seconds to work with, the middle 10 seconds, and the easy 5 seconds? You could even penalize for interacting with the other scoring opportunities before your task is complete.

Why not do it in reverse, and force the teams going after the harder task to do it in less time? Sounds like a better challenge to me.

I think FIRST has hit a good point with autonomous this year; namely that it matters in the game. Autonomous could help you get a few extra points the past few years, but truthfully 90%+ of all matches were completely unaffected by what happened in autonomous mode. Games have gone from "oh, we don't need to worry about autonomous, we won't be down by more than 3 points" to "we need someone to try to block them or we'll be starting down 15 points and they'll get to start on defense". Autonomous may have actually had too large a bonus attached to it this year, but I think it's much easier to lower the bonus a little than to continue trying to increase the importance of it and hoping it will finally affect the outcome of the game.

Autonomous is forcing teams to look at even more of an all around robot; you need good drivers, a well built robot, good programming, and some good alliance partners to win.