RACK & ROLL Reaction

[Kamikaze]

An observation about game complaints: Speaking as a 4th-year FRC programmer, I would say that the differences between the competence of programming teams will be more related to the programming skill, enthusiasm, and awareness of good development practice of the team members more than a particular familiarity with a specific component.

So I don't think the arguments about cameras being easier for veterans that have been presented in this thread hold much water. Teams with quality robot code will have good programming as long as they can retain their skilled members and good practices (e.g. use revision control, sub-divide tasks, test at every step, etc.). The best way to improve your programming team is by having members become passionate about computer science in their own time and investing some effort to go read a few books and papers (and you certainly can't level that out with rules).

I'm not a big fan of the CMUCam's capabilities either. However, it's certainly a relevant technology for us roboticians. Guess what Stanford used on their winning DARPA autonomous vehicle? A camera augmented with laser range finders. This stuff will be important, even though we won't get to play with bayesian inference engines on our dinky PICs.

Finally, perhaps it's valuable to see the wide range of opinions that exist about this year's game, but I think some people are being unnecessarily negative in this thread ("hate" is a strong word and all that). Maybe we should reserve some judgement on whether the game design was good or bad until we actually get some robots built and see some competition. Sorry for adding another rant to this thread (meta-rant though).