SkillsUSA Mobile Robotics Technology (MRoT)

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Hello! As many of you know, I am Gigahertz.t, and I participate in SkillsUSA Mobile Robotics Technology (MRoT for short). I have been getting some questions lately, and this is meant as a general thread to address them.

  1. What is SkillsUSA?
    a. SkillsUSA is a giant organization with many different competitions with the purpose of training people to participate better in the skileld workforce. MRoT is a very small category, there are many others including construction, medical services, automotive repair, etc. There are three tiers: regionals (for California 3, around January), states (top 3 in region qualify and held around April in California), and nationals (top 1 from each state qualifies, held around late June). There is a worldwide competition called WorldSkills, though I don’t know much about that.
    b. MRoT is a modified VRC skills challenge based on what the current year’s game is. The game manual is usually last updated around November (yes, we still have the elevation cap on :frowning: ). Since it is modified from the original manual, there are a lot of weird things (like why would you need to define pinning in skills matches?). At states and nationals, the field layout is shifted and the point systems for scoring matches are modified. This is the competition rubric:
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    As you can see, SkillsUSA prioritizes the Engineering notebook and interviews far more than the actual robot itself. They don’t care as much if your robot can get 500 skills (the “what”), but more if you can explain how and why you did it that way.
  2. Team Numbers
    a. Team numbers (for California at least) are 4 digits, numbers only. Hence why discord approval bots get kinda wonky when we apply.
  3. Do you participate in VRC?
    a. No. Some schools may run both programs, but SkillsUSA is an entirely separate entity from VEX, IFI, and RECF.
    b. Personally, next year our club may push to go into VRC, but due to funding technicalities, it means that we would have to find outside funding and start almost from scratch.
    c. However, aside from SkillsUSA allowing 3d printing, both competitions use the same platform, parts, and inspection rubric.
  4. Why are you on here?
    a. Well, SkillsUSA is very similar to VRC skills challenges, so they cross over pretty easily. Plus I like helping people :slight_smile:

Also, just wondering, how many of you do SkillsUSA?

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Thank you so much for this! I appreciate the resource.

They allow 3D printing? Just wondering, could you elaborate on what that is like? Do teams 3DP the whole bot? Does PLA go flying everywhere? Are there restrictions? What about TPU… If you have pictures of any 3DP bots, I would love to see.

Also, what is the highest score you’ve seen/heard of?

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As for 3D printing,

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There seems to be no restriction as to how much we can 3D print (I myself have printed out about 13 gears, modified c-channels, and barrier sleds). Surprisingly not many parts are 3d printed, and most of what I print can easily be made from cutting/drilling regular parts/polycarb (so far…)

If ANY part, even a little nut or zip-tie falls off/detaches from your bot during a skills match and the ref sees it, you are disqualified from that match (we only have 3 attempts each for auton and driver), so there is a strong incentive not to have something shatter (that would also lead to saftey penalizations, which is another big part of the rubric).

If you saw that post I made on the “share pics of your bots thread” of my drivetrain, all the bright red gears are 3d printed.

I’ll have to ask my sister team (I haven’t attended a comp yet, this is my first year competing).

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