I’ve spent a little bit of time thinking about this. Would definitely be in the “cool” category.
Agreed the biggest gap is accurate, timestamped X/Y location data on the field. Camera data is getting us better, but more fixed reference points around the points of interest on the field will be critical. Still, I personally think the best systems would be like what Hollywood uses for motion capture - high-precision sensors in fixed locations, identifying targets on robots, and streaming the data back to them.
Once you have that, the floodgates open. Most of the other main headaches have been solved and proven in competition: Real-time path-planning, sequencing robot parts to be autonomous… The supplier base provides large selections of legal and cheap sensors that more than fit the bill to automate the vast majority of tasks.
I imagine a driver station consisting simply of a large touchscreen. A graphical display of the field, with hotspots to tap on to instruct the robot what to do, maybe some ability to draw paths to follow with your finger…Something intuitive enough to be manipulated at a very high speed. Ultimately, the drivers build up a queue of tasks they want the robot doing, and the auto routines on the robot execute the tasks in the most efficient, pre-programmed manner possible.
Then.
If you can gather information about what the other robots are doing, you could start to build up a match strategy algorithm. Robot decides for itself what’s the best way to score points, given the current state of the match. Go a step further and add in your scouting data on other robots from other matches, to skew the strategy toward what the alliances’ strengths and weaknesses are.
No more need for drivers to manually input data, just let the FMS say “go” and the blue banners come flooding in.
Now. I do have some feelings about what FIRST looks like when we actually get to this point. For the very first team that does it, yea, it’s super cool and awe inspiring!. I’d probably have to spend years just to understand how the system works… If i’m even capable of understanding it.
However, I think there would be something lost when we take humans out of the real-time competition. There’s unique value in the problem statement “you must perform your best during these exact 2 minutes and 15 seconds to win”. When you smear the “excellence window” over multiple weeks, I personally think the competition looses something.
) for their robot.