Thoughts about future autonomous scoring...

[Astronouth7303]

I think having some unofficial awards for auton would be cool, no matter how they're done. More teams need to "get it" with this whole "smart machine" thing. (There are many that are adverse to anything more to a fancy RC car, for no apparent reason. I've had to fight this all year.)

Autonomous mode is also a good chance to bluff. You load your robot on to the field with a keeper, only to find out that all you do is drive forward and put it right in front of the robot on the other side. Not necessarily a useful auton, but it has more than bluffing merit; you would be clogging the field just a little bit more.

Also, a lot of the best robots involve a lot of autonomous-like stuff in operator mode. Instead of hooking joysticks to motors, you take joysticks as input (more like suggestions) and drive control algorithms based on it. Meaning: Use same/similar code for autonomous and drivers. I know one team won an award at the Buckeye regional back in 2004 for there gyro-straight user mode. (Meaning, a gyro kept them driving straight, even in user mode.)

The easiest way to write autonomous IMHO is to do the hardware-interfacing legwork in advance and write a particular autonomous using that code.