I just got back from my first vex competition yesterday and we some awesome robots. One particular robot that owned the entire competition 11-0-0, was a robot built by Green Egg Robotics (GER). Their scoring mechanism consisted of surrounding the goal post and scoring on them using 2 high-strength gears and chains. THEN it would pickup the goal post it just scored on and dispense it into the center of the high-hanging structure.
Our team had a similar idea but we were worried about size restrictions and lack of power from the motors to lift the goal post. GER used a pulley-like mechanism to lift the goal post up by lowering their scoring mechanism.
Very impressive robot. I’ll see if i can find pictures.
I KNEW IT!!
i knew green eggs would do something nobody did before!
people might have talked about it, but not excecute it well enough so it would give them a 11-0 win record
any pics???
soo excited to play them at worlds now! ^^
I love how everyone asks for pictures even when he said he’d look for them. :rolleyes: Haha, anyway.
I was not surprised when I heard about Green Egg’s robot, well maybe a little but now hearing that they went 11-0-0 it must truly be a beast. Makes sense though, as I wouldn’t expect Green Egg to build a robot that wasn’t. Looking forward even more to seeing them at the VMAC.
The strategy can be beaten, like any other. If anything, it makes the use of a manipulator that can work through and around the tower even more important than it already was this year.
I believe the robot only has to carry the goalpost for the time it takes to reach the tower. I am guessing they are using a shifting transmisson to accomplish that.
Our teacher took lots of pictures of GER’s robot. I’ll ask her to email me them tomorrow when we have school.
Yes, it was very fast. It owned every moving goal post in less than a minute. and Yes it could score on the high goal posts.
When the robot had the weighted goal post, it did not have to move very far to dispense it into the hanging structure because the robot itself was 18x18x18.
I would assume The Eggs will upload some sort of video or picture at the end of the season, they always do. Let them show what they want to show, when they want to show it.
From what i have seen pictures of good robots leads to cloning and cloning leads to less fun. Plus it means that they will have worked so hard at their design just to have people copy it by brainlessly looking at a picture.
Do you really want to compete against GER and 100 clones of the thing if they are that good?
I’d agree that it’s not polite to “out” a team’s design without their consent, but as to “not fair”…it’s been said several times before, but we all sign away our privacy by entering competitions. 44 has wisely kept to a competition area that has historically put out relatively little online media, compared with more “public” regions: Hawaii, Pacific NW, and SoCal come to mind. A good design wouldn’t last a single tournament in those places without the entire world seeing it.
Chris - it won’t take a screw-by-screw to lessen 44’s advantage this April. The fact that Godzilla even posted their strategy has already taken some of it away.
Last thing - 44 and 1103’s designs have been published within days, yet neither team is complaining. It tells you something about their character.
I agree with Hecko. That’s what makes vex fun is the amount of diversity these robots achieve and with everyone copying, it’s not fun. If you would like to actually see the robot I feel you should take the time to go see them compete. And yes I understand some people want to see how they could use some of their ideas or how to beat them, but i believe Godzilla gave a pretty good explanation on what their robot does and you could work from there.
I was amazed by GER. Their design was near-perfect. Our team initially tried a similar goal-pickup design, but gave up after it consistently failed (this was before we bought the high-strength motors). We will likely go back to the strategy, as it is clearly works very well.
I completely agree, and I respect why teams would want that to be minimized. In my personal opinion, though, I think it’s great. I love when this happens, though I’ll never do it especially if a team asked me not to.
If your strategy only works because no one has heard of it, and can otherwise be easily stopped, it’s simply security by obscurity. Counterdesign and metagaming are strategic elements not yet common in competitive robotics, but they are definitely incredibly interesting to watch. From a strategist’s perspective, a wide open field with knowledge of everyone makes for the best games.
From a design perspective, different questions arise as technical execution of a similar strategy are most of the fun and challenge of VRC as a whole. In other formats I think it would be no big deal but in VRC the platform is more or less designed for screw-screw copies. I do think a certain amount of technical inspiration is both possible and beneficial with design publication without outright copying. That’s what blurry webcast video is for!
So will Green Eggs be worse off because people tuned in to a strategy that’s worked for months? Yes, but it’s better than an artificially underdeveloped competitive metagame. This kind of thing keeps the good teams on their toes and makes sure they have to think more than once a year.
Most of the time, it’s not the strategic decisions that are unique, but how a team implements them that is. In May last year, I met with a large group of students to brainstorm ideas for Round Up. I haven’t seen a single robot this year that wasn’t predicted in that one 2-hour brainstorming session. The fact that Green Eggs made it work is the breakthrough, not that they thought of putting goals under the ladder. I doubt that many experienced teams missed the opportunity to hide goals (either by putting them under the ladder or by shoving them all in a corner and then defending them), but I don’t think many teams thought that VEX robots were capable of moving 10-pound goals in an efficient way.
I’m trying to think of any strategy I’ve seen in the last five years that hadn’t already come up in a planning meeting, and I can’t think of one. I have, however, seen some implementations that really impressed me.
I’ll post a video of the entire competition instead of pictures of GER’s robot. I’m not trying to promote copy-cats but even if that is not my intention it will happen anyway. I just thought that their robot was really impressive and deserved recognition. I’m at school now and will check back in about 6 hours.
Even if you DID post the pics, do u think that green eggs will stop improving their robot?
NO!
They will keep on improving their robot so even if someone made an EXACT clone, their robot will still beat their old “outdated” design
I don’t know why everyone is complaining…
They will simply out “egg” you
They keep there designs as secret as possible to stop other countrys coming in and using there exact design! It’s there Design no one elses it’s not fair to Upload pictures of there robot with out there consent. It’s not right.
It would suck if you had spent hundreds of hours on a design and then someone coming in and stealing it building a robot in 5 day’s which is an extact replica.
murdomeek upload pictures of your bot. How it is built etc see how many copys you get.
in the VI competition this weekend (see my sig) we have seen at least FIVE copies of our robot. did they beat us? no, those robots were not even up to speed in our version 1 of the robot and we ourselves have already updated our robot to version 3
even if they copy our version 3 for next competition, we will have version 4 ready to battle
the “imitating” teams did not copy screw for screw, instead they made some of their own adjustments and tweaks that they thought was better for the robot.
even titans robot, the whole SUMMARY about the robot is on the video, but i bet nobody can build the robot and program it as well the original
just putting that our there…
