Are they really robots?

[Chris27]

Originally Posted by rtfgnow

Citation please. The value of this definition changes if it is from wikipedia, Marium-Webster, an engineering dictionary or yourself.

I've taken a few robotics courses at CMU and have talked with a few of the professors in the robotics institute. What I stated pretty much reflects their opinion. This is coming from some pretty respected names in the robotics field such as Manuela Veloso and "Red" Whittaker.

I don't think it is a bad thing that FIRST robots are not really robots. The goal of FIRST is to change our culture into thinking that science and technology are really cool. If the rules changed to ban/greatly reduce teleoperation, then the games will have to be really simplified as making a "smart" AI is really hard. The game would be much less accessible as 1) programming AIs is really frustrating and teams w/o a strong foundation in programming would really struggle to arrive at anything useful and 2) the game will be much slower paced and probably be perceived as boring by the audience watching the game. Compare a FIRST match to a Robocup match using the NAO humanoids. It would be nice though if FIRST gave larger incentive to successfully doing autonomous. I don't think FIRST will ever be able to go completely autonomous anytime in the near future but if a team is able to go above and beyond in implementing autonomous, why not reward them?