I run a grade school vex iq robotics club and have decided there is no need for organized competition at that level. The goal is to get them more interested in STEM and learn a couple fundamental concepts just like a class without grading.
Now when I step back to my Vex team where my team has spent seven years learning via a robotics design system, as the head designer I tell my team a metaphor, we can reinvent offense used in football by switching the lineman with the skill positions and the skill positions with the lineman or we can set up a conventional tried and true offense spending more of our practice getting stronger than the opponents, creating strategies to exploit mismatches, and trick plays to catch the defense off guard. Which style would you choose spending time on, hint every team in the NFL’s conference championships chose the same one?
My team chose not to reinvent the wheel instead deciding to climb up the mountain of efficiency. On the way we met 4886a who showed us how to get better picking things up and 7090 pointed out that a launcher help the objects flow faster. Then 21B came by and told us 4886a gave them the same information and now they call their rendition of it, Magic.
I see this collaboration all around me helping society inch forward. I go to school every day learning about concepts Isaac Newton, Galileo, Watson/Crick, and Pythagoras discovered so that one day I might make a contribution that will make society better.
If I had decided I wanted to discover those things all by myself instead of accepting help from others I would haveto make one million hole in one ideas just to move out of the stone age.
I appreciate the human race’s ability to pass on ideas right now to others and also to record them for future use i.e. gateways influence on toss up.
When I go to state this year and someone beats me with a design I created for the first tournament that they have now enhanced much farther than I could have, I will congratulate them for being engineers. They have solved a problem in a timely matter, with the materials they had and the knowledge they had gained to make the best machine for the Vex competition criteria they could.
So try this… walk up to an Indy Car designer (or Formula 1, etc.) and say, “Your cars all look the same. Why don’t you do something original?”
Or, next time you happen to be having coffee with Elon Musk, tell him that his rockets all look like old NASA ones and that he should really be more creative.
And don’t even get me started about Boeing! Sure, they SAY the Dreamliner has all these fancy features, but it looks just like every other jet airliner out there. BOR-ING!
I’ve probably done tech inspection on a couple hundred robots this season and… with the exception of a set of ‘triplets’ intentionally designed to be identical… have yet to see two robots that look alike. Even the triplets had a few small differences when I took the time to ask about them.
I think, that this design convergence, is only natural. With the way it is, it only bound to happen. And as discussed above, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Not only that, but the game, toss up is responsible for this. The game rules are now narrowing down things for offensive robots. Don’t get me wrong about the design of the game, it’s actually very hard to design a good game, and they did a good job, but the rules are now getting less and less lenient on the way GER, wall bots, (these are examples of unique robots) can be built. There are rules against latching onto the field. There are possession rules, only 3 Bucky balls, etc. Although there may not be that many restrictions, they are enough to create this design convergence. An example of this in the real life, is in an old formula one car. I’m not an expert, but I believe that there was a formula one car, that had six wheels. 4 wheels in front, and 2 in the back. The front 4 wheels all steered, to give the car superior traction and handling around corners compared to the other cars. The regulations then changed so that only 4 wheels were allowed. The rules were changed so that formula one cars, could only have 4 wheels. This is an uneducated statement though, I haven’t done my research.
I was talking to murdomeek earlier and this was pretty much our discussion. There are so many direct restrictions (such as the Bucky ball limit) and indirect restrictions (being under 12") that limit our ideas.
Mostly correct. I always thought it was really cool as a kid. I think they have stopped it in the rules after they abandoned the design. As with Vex, additional weight is a killer in F1.
I am a bit of an F1 fan and the design restrictions in F1 are severly limiting these days which makes very subtle changes to wing design, air flow, and suspension response the main visible differences.
I agree 100%. But I must say, we produced a scissor lift as our design this season without any foreign input(from another team). We never thought, however, that others wouldn’t share our insight. Great to be proved wrong, right?
Scissor lifts are for sure not as common as the norm, but it is still considered a already existent lift design, seen often in competitions. They have been used many years before already, which is probably why so many people used them this year, since they are really good for reaching that hanging bar. I started out the year with a scissor lift too even.
