This year’s game has a lot of different approaches, with a lot of different robot styles. I feel we need a topic where we decide a set of names to call each design, so discussion about said designs is uniform and not confusing. I’m going to list all of the designs so far, a suggested name for this design, and a poll to see what everyone else thinks it should be named. in a few days when I have a large number of votes, I will announce what the names of each design are. This may seem complicated and unnecessary, but I’ve noticed some confusion around vague and misleading names being used in discussion. Getting the whole of the vex forum to agree on a set of terms will allow for more productive communication and less confusion.
Design 1.
Side rollers or treads feed cubes into a tilted tray or hopper, and tilts the tray forward to set down stacks. An example of this bot would be 1727G’s early season robot.
For the name of this design, I have seen both tilter and tray bot being used. I personally don’t think either are just right, both are too vague. I propose we call these robots simple tray bots, because they are trays bots that don’t have any sort of tower scoring mechanism. Here is the poll:
- Simple Tray Bot
- Tray Bot
- Tilter
- Tray Stacker
- Other
Design 2.
Just like design 1, but has a mechanism to score towers, most commonly seen as an arm with the rollers mounted to it. An example of this design would be 448x’s early season robot. I propose we call this type of robot a complex tray bot because it would be consistent with the previous design being called simple tray bot, and the ability to score and descore towers makes it complex. But, I will admit that complex tray bot isn’t really all that descriptive and If anyone else has any other ideas please post them.
- Complex Tray Bot
- Tower Scoring Tray Bot
- Lifting Tray Bot
- Other
Design 3.
A lift, most commonly a dr4b but could be another type of lift, with a multiple cube capacity intake, designed to be able to play towers well and stack on pre-existing stacks. An example of this type of bot is 62’s early season robot. No really descriptive name comes to mind for this bot, but I’ve been calling them tube lifts, which isn’t a terrible name.
- Tube Lift
- Cage Lift
- Lift bot
- Stacker bot
- Other
Design 4.
Basically design 1, but the tray, rollers, and tilter are mounted on a lift.
This design actually hasn’t made much of an appearance yet, but I’m expecting these to start getting more common as the season progresses. I don’t have any examples because I haven’t seen any reveals of this style of bot yet. I think we should dub these robots as tray lifts, as that neatly sums up this design, and I haven’t really seen them be called anything else.
- Tray Lift
- Other
Other Designs
There are a few other designs out there, but I feel most of them are either not common enough to merit agreeing on a name for, as they rarely come up in discussion, or we already have a name with really no confusion, like a wallbot. The term wallbot has been around for a long time, and requires no change. As more designs become existent in the future, I will edit this post to fit the changes.What I want from you
So basically what I’m asking you all to do is to help us all come to an agreement on robot terminology either by voting a on the polls, or voting other on the polls and making a post about a possible name, and I will add it to the poll. I really couldn’t think of many alternative names for most of these designs, so I could really use some help in coming up with some. Also, if I forgot anything important, please tell me. Thank you for helping me with this, and I hope that this topic will give us consistent and clear terminology for the season.
EDIT: I’m making this post a wiki so it can be edited indefinitely. As long as nobody deletes or makes any negative changes, you’re welcome to add your name suggestions to the polls via wiki edit.