Preparing CS students for the Robotics Revolution

[Jared Russell]

It all has to do with game design, in my opinion. Games have historically rewarded mechanical excellence over software accomplishments (how many field-centric holonomic drives have been on Einstein?). This is partially for pragmatic reasons: fully autonomous robots are really, really hard to get working well (like, DARPA and NASA hard). How many 15 second autonomous periods end up with more than half the field not moving, or driving in circles? FIRST is about inspiring - building cool mechanical systems is the low hanging fruit of inspiration for high school students.

That said, "if you build it, they will come". If autonomous mode was consistently absolutely critical to the game (2003 and 2006 come to mind), the smart teams would realize that they need to spend more time on their software.

But like I said, full autonomy is hard. Now, "supervised autonomy" (think 2008) - there might be some potential there. I am a big fan of game tasks that a human operator simply cannot do all that well as a mechanism for increasing the prevalence of computer science in FIRST.

What if there was an opaque wall in the middle of the field, and your goal was behind it?

What if there was some sort of door that had to be opened? Fine motor skills are hard to orchestrate from ~27 feet away.

What if the game pieces were tens to hundreds of tennis balls - some colored blue, some colored red. Red wants the red balls in goal 1 and the blue in goal 2. Blue wants the blue balls in goal 1 and the red in goal 2. The balls are all mixed together when you pick them up. A semi-autonomous ball sorting technique would sure be useful, huh?