Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You

[oddjob]

Originally Posted by W1NG$

I think what FIRST is really trying to do though is make the competition viewer and fan friendly. No one wants to watch a low scoring match of slow moving robots.

... or a high scoring match. Who'd pay to watch robotically driven NASCAR or robot tennis? Not many. Even the Mars rovers are driven by commands sent from Earth, with some autonomy build in to the rover. (human said what?).

A fully autonomous FIRST competition would be a dud. It's technically brilliant, but has a very limited audience. Adding some automated tasks to human control does make sense though, such as camera assisted aiming and shooting mechanisms. In Formula 1 car racing the FIA is constantly having to evaluate how much of the car is to be driven by computer versus having the driver in control. They understand the fans want to see the drivers perform too, it's not just about who has the best engineers. The same applies to FIRST.