For those of you that don’t know me, I’m Bailey, GDC Engineer here at VEX Robotics.
VEX Robotics and the REC Foundation will once again hold their seasonal Town Hall event in late October, and we want to hear from you!
Dan Mantz, CEO of the RECF, and I will be on hand to answer your questions about the state of the season, rule changes and clarifications, upcoming events, and the road to VEX Worlds during this informative and entertaining program.
Use this Forum Thread to submit your questions, and keep an eye here on VEX Forum for more information about the Town Hall.
We politely ask you to include your First Name and a Team Number on any question submissions. In order to give us enough time to select our favorite questions and work to prepare for the Town Hall session, we ask all responses be submitted by Friday September 20th.
How do you think High Stakes stacks up to your favorite games of the past? Also, what do you think are key aspects about a VRC game that put it above the rest?
Were there any other rule changes that were put into consideration for the Sep 3 update? What sold you on the changes you chose?
Is the next game a NbN rework? Please tell me it is…
How far in advance are games planned? How do you design the games?
How are the triangle pvc pipes manufactured for the ladder?
What is the process behind creating updates to the games?
Are there any plans to make large gameplay changes late in the season, like last year in Over Under? (ie. updates to the value of the autonomous bonus or high stake)
What is your favorite VEX event, other than Worlds?
What locations are in consideration for Worlds 2026? Are there any plans to supply wifi to the pits, even if there is a fee, at any future worlds events?
And most importantly,
7. Will there be any AP exams administered at worlds, since many ap exams are occurring at the same time this year?
For IQ, live scoring a match is bold and new, as well as risky and error prone. Will the RECF be open to allow video replay become an option in a discrepancy come the time of regional/states and worlds championships, say for finals matches only?
What steps will VEX take towards making more reliable motors that do not lock up as frequently and break ports frequently (likely as a result of high current draw over the thin wires). Has VEX considered a different wiring solution that is more robust for the motors?
As it stands, despite minor differences, both PROS and VEXcode are near identical on paper and functionality, especially considering that both are a VSCode extension. Has VEX considered merging PROS and VEXcode into one single library that has both support of VEX as well as the community?
3D printing. I think I said enough lol.
Has VEX considered adding arc-based odometry to their library? As PROS no longer upkeeps okapi and deprecated it (hence is why PROS and VEXcode are so similar on paper now), it would be cool to see VEXcode make an attempt at an odometry solution, which would be absolutely amazing.
VEXcode is pretty amazing as it stands, however I am curious to see a “Clean” button that deletes build for you, which would be really nice.
Has VEX considered manufacturing and selling linear rails?
Has VEX considered attempts to diversify robot designs? Given the extreme presence of “meta” designs, most robot designs seem fundamentally similar, as compared to FTC and FRC robots. I understand there are some teams that make an attempt at a non-meta design however such implementations tend to veer more towards “uncanny” due to the rigid simplicity of VEX hardware.
When I was in high school, the high school rejected the idea to start a VEX robotics team because it “looks like an erector set.” In what ways can we/VEX/RECF add concepts or ideas that better make robots reflect the creativity of the VEX robotics community?
Adding on to this, can we have something like combat robotics’ “unconventional locomotion bonus” (where they give bonuses to robots who don’t use wheels on their drive base) to incentivize more creative designs? Maybe giving more motor wattage or bigger size limits? Thank you!
Are there going to be major changes to the V5 system as a whole in the near future? For example, the transition from V4 to V5 was a big one, and so was the change from 8 motors to 88 watts. Is it reasonable to expect some big changes coming soon? Perhaps 22W motors?
Context:
There have already been some significant moves in game rules this season. I am glad for them, as they seem to be responding to early events as something of a beta test. The changes are guiding the rules to arrive at an outcome that balances gameplay issues (diversity of design, apportioning of scoring values relative to difficulty, implications of rules on game tactics over the course of a match) with things like ease of violation calls for referees and quality of life for EP’s.
As an example, reducing the Corners to a triangular shape presents a challenge to teams while also simplifying referee adjudication (less goals to determine which is Placed) and eliminating a bunch of wasted tape for EPs.
Question: Is there a core design philosophy/statement that the GDC uses to test rule changes against that can be shared with the community?
Knowing the standard you aim to meet will help us all understand the rule changes when and if they occur.
I’d really appreciate if we can keep this thread a bit more clean. We will have to parse through here to try and pull questions out for the Town Hall, and the text walls aren’t going to help any.
I’d encourage one of y’all to start your own thread to continue some of this conversation! Thanks
Edit: I went ahead and moved the 2 replies to the original post over to this thread. @Connor’s original post contains a few questions for Town Hall, so I will leave that here. Quotes and post links should still work both ways.
Pasting my questions from the post that got moved to the other topic:
What is the end goal for VEX AI? Is it intended to be more of a classroom-based competition with robust mentoring to help students through the challenge? Or is it meant to be an avenue for the top tier of VRC HS and VEXU teams to go even further?
Advanced vision-based programming solutions are a way I think the program can continue to stay relevant for higher tier VRC teams and VEXU teams, especially with the introduction of the new V5 AI Vision sensor with AprilTag support. Are there any plans to introduce CV markers such as AprilTags into the field and/or field elements/game objects for more approachable CV techniques?
To add to 2, are there any plans to open source the algorithm behind the GPS strips and sensor? In some scenarios, the GPS sensor off the shelf from VEX is inadequate, and teams prefer to rely on their own localization techniques. If the GPS strip and associated algorithm were open source, teams in VEX AI and VEXU may be able to take advantage of the GPS strip using their own cameras and processing.
What is the status of the VEX AI Stereo 3D camera?
I have a different view regarding how meta comes about.
When compared to the earlier years, nowadays there are a lot more rules and lesser grey areas.
In those early years, most of us lived by, and are comfortable with the basic rule of “if it is not forbidden in the manual, means it is allowed”.
There were a lot more leeways for teams to be innovative in the approaches to games, etc.
Eg. Given the current game rules, I don’t think we will ever see 2W wallbot or those tether-bots in Clean Sweep, etc.
As Meng said, as a result of game manuals being much more verbose now compared to years in the past, there is a lot less wiggle room for possible robot designs.
VRC games are primarily offensive. This is stated in the game manual, and is reflected in the design of the game. That being said, defensive strategies are a lot weaker because of the aforementioned points.
The VRC competition season is a full year. This gives teams an extremely long time to continuously iterate on both robots and strategy. Building a VEX robot is not that difficult, teams have literally built 14+ robots in a single season (and one of them made dome this past Worlds).
All this being said, the restrictiveness of the game manual, design philosophy of the games themselves, and the length of the season all contribute towards singular metas evolving and seeing design convergences at the end of the season. In FRC, you don’t get that luxury. Most teams will make at most a second robot if time permits.
