My son just started to participate in the VEX IQ elementary competition this year. We are new to the VEX world. As a former electrical engineer, I’ve been exploring the platform through projects like maze-solving robots and self-balancing systems.
While the hardware kit is excellent, I believe adding support for components like shaft encoders, AI vision sensors, and Jetson Nano connectivity would open up opportunities for more advanced programming and robotics education from middle school through college level.
I hope these additions can be considered for future development?
For more complicated things like this, they are available in V5. V5 is meant to be more coding involved. By adding these in Vex IQ, the ecosystem would be overly complicated which is just not what the IQ system is meant for.
No association to Vex here, so large grain of salt with what I have to say here.
I doubt that things like this will overall come into IQ. Some of those things are available on the V5 system, and given the various stages of Vex products at this point (Go, 123, IQ, V5/EXP), I would guess there won’t be much of that for IQ. The various levels build up in complexity and capabilities, generally commensurate with intended grade levels and the concepts that most in that age group will be able to effectively use.
Recently Vex relaunched their vision sensor as the “AI vision sensor”; the original one had IQ ports and support, but the new one is V5 (and maybe EXP) only. That they chose to skip IQ for this hints to me that IQ won’t be seeing extra sensors like that.
As a software engineer myself, I have thought as well that additional sensors would be cool to have, but in the end, it doesn’t really fit into the educational space for that product line. There’s also differences in computing power between IQ and V5/EXP that enable more sensors and higher data rates on the V5-type brain, though the newer IQ brain is more powerful.
VEX IQ is meant to be a stepping stone for VEX V5, which is a metal-based (instead of plastic-based) version of VEX IQ, but also with more sensors and versatility. VEX V5 has its own dedicated shaft encoders, AI Vision sensors, and can even be configured to support Jetson Nano.