I don’t believe there are directions for the robot pictured. Besides, the documentaries this year have the same effect pretty much.
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Sounds a lot like the Skills award.
VEX does provide reference designs for how to adapt the clawbot to the game. Note that both the V5 and Lift have their flaws, and to be truly competitive, teams employing the design would need to make significant improvements to the design for speed, accuracy and drivability…
So, I am not sure why you are miffed? Because you don’t want others to a learning path to competition robotics? It’s ok to let new friends play in your sandbox with shiny new toys.
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From an EP standpoint, getting judges to watch all the matches and drivers would be a logistic headache.
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The robot shown on the vex website is most certainly not a “competitive” one. It picks up 3 cubes, and then places them in the zone. Sure it can do towers, but really any dedicated goofy bot should be able to hold their own against this hodgepodge of a robot.
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Oh wait what? I thought it was a full fledged goofy bot.
(I’ll do my research next time)
I think this is a good idea! the driver on our team went from zero to hero so rewarding that would be cool. but I find it hard to quantify and compare different teams driving because driving skill is like directly related to how good your robot is in general. generally speaking you can get away with bad programming, you can get away with bad build quality and you can get away with a bad notebook (or none at all), But not so much bad driving. So they’d be just be picked up by excellence winners and tournament winners anyways so its kinda redundant.
and i think skills award already does the job of how good you can drive since they are mostly made up of your driver score.
but anyways for fun if i were to give out driving rewards i give them to 574c or 16075b, so dangerous
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whoa since when was that a thing
It’s not just driving, you have to have a solid robot to begin with.
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Even playing fields may not always be the best, since if all robots costed the same, they would also likely be the same level, teams that are less dedicated may have the resoures, but may want to use those resoureces elsewhere
This would be a fun idea!
Driving the robot isn’t really a STEM-related skill, but it does involve other skills that are useful in many careers (especially strategy, if you include the whole drive team). There are already other awards that don’t directly relate to STEM (Energy, Sportsmanship, etc), but are based on other skills that will help you in your career (and in life in general).
The main problem I see with this award is that it might require the judges to watch more matches than they currently do (to separate the driving quality from the robot quality), instead of just a few matches that have teams they’re already considering for awards. (For Amaze, they can look at the match results and Skills if they don’t get to see a team’s matches.)
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Well the things is many robots these days are still driven by humans, when they do tasks similar to Vex robots. Since most robots that move from place to place are used to go to places where humans cannot go, example Area 51
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As an event partner, I think this could be fun, but at least for now would have to be unofficial and democratic. The best evaluators for this award are the drive teams, not any individual official or judge. Therefore this award would need to be democratic in a trusting environment.
I would propose that each team gets a vote, where they turn in (digitally or physically) a ballot of their top 3 teams (in order) as “best drive team” which includes driving skill, communication, and strategy. Then use a ranked election format to determine the winner.
I would recommend voting either before/after alliance selection, so that there is enough time to tally the winner before the awards ceremony. Otherwise, ideally teams could vote before grand finals (or on their way out if they leave when they are eliminated), and then quickly produce a winner.
Since there are no democratically elected awards in vex, this would be the first, for better or worse. I would love to try this out in my league this year, unofficially of course.
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Some judged awards in divisions at Worlds are voted on by the students, but I don’t know of any other events that do this.
I’m sure there are some events that do this for unofficial awards, though, and I think it would be a very good idea.
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A lot of events here have the Sportsmanship Award voted on by teams. What you end up seeing usually is a 4 way tie between teams, and the judges decide what the award goes to. It doesn’t qualify here, but it still is pretty rewarding to teams
I would argue that the skills award is mainly driving. I think that is the closest thing that you could get to a driving award, because it is too hard for judges to watch the driving of every match.
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