I personally enjoyed the SANDSTORM mechanic this year. Our team hasn’t been very strong in autonomous for a while, so actually contributing for the whole match instead of sitting still on the carpet or just moving across the line was nice to see.
I can see the merit to the “stuck in the middle” argument, but I don’t know how the GDC could implement both SANDSTORM and still incentivize autonomous in an obvious way. (Of course, good auto is always going to outperform driver control, but good auto is hard.) We do have the Autonomous and Innovation in Controls awards, so those are good.
There’s a lot programming can still do without full auto to be center-stage in. Here’s a list of some of them.
- Program driver assistance function such as homing in on vision targets (or game pieces!)
- “Macros” for tasks consisting of a lot of steps (if your driver needs to hit three buttons in the right order with the right timings, make it a single button instead.)
- Build a better camera streamer so your drivers stop complaining about how crappy the video feed is. This is not a herculean effort.
- Anti-tip! An easy project for newer programmers and a nice peace of mind with RAMMING SPEED robots out there.