New Robot Control System!

[Salik Syed]

I am excited. As a programmer it was frustrating to deal with low level stuff that didn't really matter to me. Hopefully this new system will allow programmers to tackle problems that are actually algorithmically interesting. I'm all for the higher level stuff.

In fact an added layer of abstraction between hardware and software would be beneficial for all teams regardless of skill level... having a more powerful environment would allow for more options to veterans, and an easier interface for rookies.
I don't think everyone needs multi-threading support for a Robot ... but the option of having having advanced features like it is a good thing. I know we had to do our own super simplistic psuedo-threading during autonomous.

The only real necessity is that we use this added power to make things easier... Please don't make it like windows programming or Direct X. A set of library functions and a very simplistic interface for programming would be nice for newbies.

It'd be awesome if we could hook up our robot to a windows laptop style interface. They could even provide software for building simulated robots so we didn't have to wait on the actual robot all the time. It honestly wouldn't be ridiculously hard to do... a simple physics model, constraints tool and a library of sensors/components.

Furthermore I would like to see a kit-bot which comes with more sensor integration... i.e a kitbot which anyone can throw together that will give you shaft-encoders, gyro and camera. With this should be included simple library functions for driving, turning tracking. Then we could actually do something a bit more interesting in autonomous. Right now most of autonomous is writing low-level stuff that should be library code. Moving an arm to a position isn't hard ... it's just tedious