Tower Takeover Robot Terminology

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC > Tower Takeover (19/20)
1

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
0 voters

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
0 voters

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
0 voters

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
0 voters

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.

4 Likes
2

For the record, the 448X type robot is known as a “Goofy”, and robots with a tray mounted on a DR4B is known as a “Schlong bot” (for its great height). Simple DR4B robots with whatever kind of intake are simply known as “DR4Bs”

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Glad to see that my made-up terms are becoming terminology. While Tray Bot is winning for 1727G’s robot right now, I think that Simple Tray bot helps differentiate between this and the Complex Tray.

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4

The proper terminology for this type, as seen from the Hawaii signature, is the S C H L O N G

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5

also wall bots like NorCal’s ri3d

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6

There should also be blanket references, for example, by saying “dr4b bot” it would be understood that I am referencing all variants of bot with dr4bs, ex. Tray lift with dr4b, tube lift with dr4b, etc.
By saying “cascade bot” it would be understood that I would be referencing any robot that used a cascade lift.
Also, similar designs should be grouped together.
So the simple tray and complex tray would be grouped into the traybot category.
By referencing traybot, we would be talking about both designs.
Any robot with a dr4b or a variant of it would go into the dr4b category.
By referencing the dr4b, we would be talking about tray lifts, tubes, other kinds of bot that used a dr4b as a lift.
And the list goes on

Also, instead of saying traybot, or tube bot, be more specific and say dr4b tube bot or cascade tube bot. The type of intake could be included as well as other details between the type of lift and attachment on the end.
So a tube bot employing a dr4b with a passive intake would be called “dr4b passive tube bot”

7

Perhaps we could extend this to talk about team strategies as well? I’ve had several discussions of strategy with other members of the forum and struggled with what to call certain strategies.

Here are what I’ve been calling them so far:

“Pure Stacking” - Ignoring towers completely and stacking cubes of all colors. Possibly taking care to make sure the distribution of colors is somewhat even.

“Neutral Tower” - Attempting to keep the towers such that no color has a higher bonus than any other. In other words, ensuring that there is an equal amount of all cube colors in the towers. Stacking all colors, again potentially making sure that the color distribution is even.

“Prioritize 2” - Attempts to skew the towers towards two colors. In other words, tries to make the towers be primarily two specific colors. Stacks mostly or entirely those specific colors.

“Prioritize 1” - Attempts to skew the towers towards one specific color. Stacks mostly or entirely that one specific color.

If you have any other strategies that don’t have a name yet, or have a different strategy completely, I’d like to hear it! But let’s try not to let this dissolve into an argument about which is better, there are and have been plenty of other threads for that.

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8

Wall strategy, all da way

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9

Lets call the passive tube robots “chunkers”

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10

the issue with naming robot designs based on dr4bs is that a dr4b is a very versitile lift, and summarizing all bots that use dr4b’s into a single category doesn’t tell you much. also, theres no reason to sort robots by lift type, as you can see I’ve put 62’s big scissor in with all the dr4b’s and that is because they play the game the same way.

3 Likes
11

Tbh I think there is a place for both types of groupings.
When discussing game strategy, like you mentioned, then yes, sorting bots by the way they play the game is preferable.
However, there are also instances where grouping bots based on their physical design is preferable, such as of talking of mechanisms. If I developed a passive fold out mechanism for dr4bs that I wanted to share on the forums, then I wouldn’t title it “Passive deploying mechanism for claw bots”, I would title it “Passive deploying mechanism for dr4b bots” since it only works on a robots with dr4bs.
But yes, grouping bots by gameplay is also a viable option

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There are no mechanisms that work on a dr4b that don’t work on a scissor lift. There is no reason to refer to every bot dith a dr4b as a dr4b.

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13

Wow I just messed up again. I meant to say dr4b bots, ugh this habit is harder to throw than I thought

14

I’m strongly against calling robots “Goofy” (all robots are unique in their own special way) or “Schlong” because those names are not descriptive. As has been discussed on this platform before, many prefer descriptive names.

A common example last year was the 2BC vs. the hyukapult, where they were the same design, but one name was more fitting. Same thing with the Goliath intake vs. the roller intake from ITZ.

Names should be intuitive so that nobody who missed one conversation needs to go out of their way to figure out weird terminology.

8 Likes
15

I agree, names should be intuitive. However, sometimes they may need to be abbreviated if they are long.
So maybe complex tray bot could just be “ctb”
Ex. “Hey my ctb isn’t working”
Because lets be honest, who wants to type out complex tray bot every single time?

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16

I think abbreviations are acceptable, like how we abbreviate dr4b

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17

Agreed. 2BC was widely recognized last year as well. But we don’t want to overabbreviate to the point where it just doesn’t make sense. For example, tube bot should not be abbreviated to TB.

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18

Everyone forgot to include cube puncher (Does that mean my robot is bad???). It could also be nice for people to include cube capacity in robot descriptions. Like Tube bot with 5cc. I think that having an easy way of seeing cube capacity will be nice as I think it will be a major factor in alliance selection. Who knows? Just throwing out ideas.

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19

While abbreviating is a good thing, dont go overboard and abbreviate everything. As mentioned, some things are short enough as to not need abbreviations.
I believe the rule of thumb should be if it has three or more words, abbreviate it. Any less, just type out the whole word

20

We should make it syllables as opposed to words. We abbreviate Tower Takeover TT, and Turning Point TP, but that’s kind of a game tradition.

The rule of thumb for abbreviations should also be based on the commonality of the word. We talk about DR4Bs a lot, thus we abbreviate it. But terms like High/Center Tower don’t come up as often, so we don’t call it the HT or CT.

There’s no real rule. And this discussion is kind of just us agreeing with each other without any real resolutions or revelations.

3 Likes