how are they going to power up the robots (i.e. from the beginning of the Autonomous mode)
When you bring your operator controls to the playing field, there will be a 15 pin cable which will plug into the Competition port on your operator interface(so make sure you can get to it). That cable does the following:
-Provides power to the operator interface
-Sets your radio channel to one of 35 competition-only channels
-Sends the enable/disable signal to your OI
-Sends the autonomous/user control signal to your OI
So that transformer they gave you for the OI is only needed in testing. If you want to simulate the enable/disable and autonomous switching on your own, Innovation First has a schematic on their web site for a dongle which plugs into the competition port, allowing you to toggle these functions on/off as needed.
The way things have been done in the past is that you place your robot on the field and power it up. Once you turn it on, and since your OI has already connected to the competition port the bot is disabled and they check to make sure the RC is talking with the OI. Once the match starts they will enable the bots to run in autonomous mode and then at the end of the first 15 seconds, the bots will be switched into User Control mode. At the end of the match the robots are disabled. Then you turn the power off before you leave the field.
See Team update 11 for the bit specifications.
Steve