I wish that programs like VEX and FLL would do away with the "tele-operated" portions of their competitions. Kids may enjoy it, but too many of them fall into the trap of treating it all like a remote controlled toy and never get very deep into the programming aspect.
Packages would arrive along a conveyor belt and get put on a tray in a big train of trays (like a roller coaster for boxes).
A scanner would read a bar code on the package (sense).
The bar code would correspond to a particular loading bay where a truck was waiting that the package needed to be put on. (think - match code with loading bay).
When the tray went around and reached the chute for that loading bay it would tilt up and slide the box down to where it could be loaded (act).
Of course even with the requirement of mechanical motion, you could still argue a toaster is a robot. It's hard to define robot: http://robohub.org/robohub-roundtable-why-is-it-so-difficult...
However, FTC, supposedly the grown up version of FLL, had both teleop and autonomous, and with the way it was scored, all you really needed was a solid teleop to crush regional competitions, so we ended up doing way less programming than in middle school FLL. I believe VEX worked the same way, but I only did it one year, so my memory of it is fuzzy.
It’s kind of simplistic to say all you need is a good teleop period. In many competitions some teams that had worse teleop were picked because they could consistently score in autonomous, which is pretty good EV.
For example, a phone isn't a robot, not unless you give it wheels and the ability to act.
Mostly because it is so different from what some people naively imagine when you asked them to think of a design for a robot to wash dishes.
Also, reminds me of this:
Status: Alive
An argument against the thesis that "robots" will lead to catastrophic loss of jobs, is that the concept of "robot" in a strict sense (intended as a sudden similarity to human intelligence/capacity) doesn't really exist, because "robots" are simply a form automation - and civilization has been incrementally developing automation for 250 years by now.
sorry, this was what I was looking for,