Drive Team Configuration

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

It's your duty in FRC to your teammates and alliance partners to put the most competitive robot possible on the field.

Originally Posted by theprgramerdude

Wrong sir. Very wrong. There is absolutely no duty whatsoever to field the best competitive robot a team can, absolutely not. It is your opinion that putting out a good tele-operated robot would be better than an autonomous one to work with, but that is just YOUR OPINION. The fact that others may share you opinion does not mean that it is going to be a fact, as it's still YOUR OPINION.

Going back to the FIRST acronym, For INSPIRATION and Recognition of SCIENCE and Technology, a working, functioning autonomous robot is hands-down the best way, IMO, to get people to be inspired by the competition.

Pay close attention to the other two letters you ignored there. We're not just talking FIRST. We're talking the FIRST Robotics Competition. If you are going for "impressive" at the expense of "competitive", it's my opinion that you're being unreasonably selfish.

That's even before considering the increasingly obvious fact that the programmer in question (and his entire team, for that matter) has more than a few other things to work on before getting to the point where a fully autonomous robot is anything more than a fantasy.