Inspire Award Nominees

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC > Previous Games
1

I haven’t found a thread for nominating Inspire Award winners for the 2011-2012 season, so I thought I’d start one here.

I don’t know their team number, or if they even have a team this year, but I’d like to nominate Iolani Robotics here: http://www.iolani.honolulu.hi.us/robotics/newweb/webpages/vrc2009update.html

My team appreciates being able to see robots in the development stage, with single mechanisms that are easy to see and emulate, as opposed to completed robots with many mechanisms that are hard to reverse engineer. I have an all-rookie team that experimented with several 4-bar lifts (the main feature of this year’s bot) and found Iolani’s to be the simplest, yet solid and reliable. A few other mechanisms, like their pneumatic scissor lift also piqued my team’s interest (a project for another day, when we can cannibalize the competition bot). This is a great starting place for beginners who want to move forward efficiently. Iolani was also nice about sending close-ups of mechanisms that couldn’t be seen in the posted photos upon request.

Our team also was intrigued by 3018’s staggered-bar 4-bar lift (they also graciously sent detailed photos), but even with the close-ups, it was too difficult for our team to replicate.

2

They are: team 2438, from their homepage

3

So are they still competing and have the same team number this year? I wasn’t sure, as I haven’t noticed recent updates on their website and/or forum posts since the 2009 Clean Sweep season.

4

Hi, thanks for your nomination :)!

We are competing this year, but tournaments in Hawaii are done for our high school team. ThirteenofTwo and I are both from 2438. I know what you mean though: our website has not been updated for a really long time!

This year we’ve made this thread: https://vexforum.com/t/2438-gateway-update-thread/19792/1 that has some pictures of what we’ve done this season. Thanks again!

5

i cant seem to find the thread, but the person who posted the finals video of the NZ world cup
this let all the other teams in the world (that just came back from summer vacation) realize the dominant design and how developed the robots were already!
this saved lots of teams many months of prototyping. i personally think that it’s because this video was posted so early, we are seeing teams this year who are almost at their peak efficiency, and its only January!
this will leave plenty of time for teams to think of more complex strategies, and for the elite teams, make a robot solely for the strategy they choose (aka “green eggs robot”)

6

We are designing around strategy now :stuck_out_tongue: it took months of prototyping and testing to get them right… we started straight after worlds and havent stopped since :stuck_out_tongue: