What Can Be Done About Blatant G2/R2 violations?

VEX V5 Robotics Competition
1

As anyone who participates in online discussions about VEX knows, G2/G4 violations, such as copying or buying robots are a major issue. Images such as this

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And this
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have been circulating discord servers and the forums recently. Last year, multiple teams from the same extremely successful org had pictures of their middle school and high school robots posted side by side, and they were quite literally exactly the same. In the MS US Open, there were 6-7 robots from different organizations that had exactly identical robots. All of these issues were in V5RC last year. In IQ, I believe the problem is even worse. I do not compete in IQ, so I don’t have as many examples, but I have seen even worse problems from just browsing YouTube. Just Ben Lipper and this
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Youtube channel have uploaded 3 videos that provide close up photos and/or instructions with the explicit intention of allowing students to build those exact robots. These channels both have well over 8000 views for Mix and Match alone, which means that a decent amount of students are probably building these robots.
I think that these problems stem from casual disregard for/ignorance of the student centered policy. Students on discord from high ranking teams casually admit to a number of violations, a mentor in my region have completely disregarded me when I prove to them that they have violated the Student centered policy and then bragged about how good of a mentor they are later, students openly talk about having cobuilt robots, adults unaffiliated with any organization post instructions for competitive robots online, and so many more examples occur all the time. These issues make the Student centered policy seem less important to new competitors, especially in some extremely competitive regions. Disqualifying teams who build Lipperbots and other instruction bots is obviously extremely difficult, and there are no rules in place to stop adults from providing instructions, because that would be even more difficult, as they often don’t mentor any organizations. I do not mean to call out any teams in this post, nor do I want to point fingers at anyone except those who cause the problem, like Ben Lipper, and I completely understand the RECF does as much as it can to prevent these rule violations.
TL;DR:
Does anyone have any ideas as to how to solve the problem of adults unaffiliated with organizations posting instructions for competitively viable robots in IQ or V5?

2

First, it is critically important for everyone to remember not to call out teams or organizations on VEXforum about Code of Conduct and Student-Centered policies. There is a process for reporting teams/organizations. Publishing team #, names, or other identifying information to cast doubt on a team/organization reputation is unsportsmanlike, and against Code of Conduct.

That said, the concern is real and global, and is not limited just to Robotics Competition, but a lot of Youth Sports where for-profit organizations are inserting themselves into what had been community, and often, volunteer run youth activities. This season VEX Australia has adopted a policy restricting who can participate in qualifying events. Though it seems that the link to is no longer directly visible on library.recf.org
https://kb.roboticseducation.org/hc/en-us/articles/31773688980503-2025-2026-Team-Participation-Policy-for-Australia

In addition, RECF is providing EPs the opportunity to offer School-based teams only events, and piloting a School Conference in IQ program this season.

These initiative appear to provide a relief valve of sorts to leveling the playing field for teams that meet at schools as part of their learning environment.

So what should teams do if they spot G1, G2, G4, R2 violations? Simple, notify the EP, Head Referee, or Judge Advisor - depending on the situation, it can lead to the team not being considered for any Judge Awards, Disqualification from matches and/or the event.

Let’s consider a hypothetical - team uses a design originating from outside their team, it could lead the Head Referee to DQ the team from current match and all upcoming matches until it is fixed. If it is in G1 lane, the team may be removed from event.

There are many tools, and they seem to have too little impact on reducing this win at all cost mentality where team participants are really not learning from a student-centered journey, but being told what to do. I have no fix all solution at this point.

3

There’s not much we can directly do to change how people do this- There’s always going to be young customers with ambition to win they don’t know how to use that just want to win and always gonna be greedy creators, that’s usually how it works out.
With the selling of robots on platforms, you can flag or report them- But you need to explain WHY it needs to be taken off each time you do this because Ebay or Offerup or whatever you see something on would ignore it- They don’t know what the VEX manual says, and little do they care without enough people reporting and reasoning.

Same with youtube creators, you report the channel and videos, but it’ll take more people to finally have it taken down. But I’m not sure if youtube would see this as a problem, cause to be taken off it takes 3 strikes IF they violate YOUTUBE’S RULES! And as I’m reading it says that creators have copyright on what’s posted, so if we say “People are copying this, nadnananna, it’s bad for the VEX community!, here’s why nanaanda” then they’ll likely rather warn the owner compared to take down the videos.
So- Not much we can do, just small things.

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Ben Lipper does not endorse copying robots, he provides pictures of robots to give people inspiration or a general idea of how it is built, allowing them to continue building it in their own way. The pictures usually do not show enough to completely “hole-count”, but rather to the extent of a robot reveal. I have seen teams attempt to hole-count and create an exact copy of a Lipper bot, however, none have been successful and all “copied” robots usually just flop during a competition.

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I think that there’s not a lot of things they can do except for removing the team from the tourney which could be unfair to some teams

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where was the second image posted on?

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Who could this be unfair to? I don’t understand.

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I am sorry, but this is just incorrect. He has always started his videos with

Now, if you’re looking at this robot and thinking “hey, maybe that’s the robot I’m interested in building,” go ahead and click the link underneath this video.

This proves that he is sending pictures with the intention of teams copying the entire robot or mechanisms exactly.

I disagree. I’ve emailed asking for pictures, as I had just gotten a VEX IQ kit, and I could have holecounted that robot if I wanted to put effort into it.
Additionally, in his latest Mix and Match video, he
implied that he expected teams to build his robot and did not say anything to discourage it. The (slightly paraphrased to remove um’s) quote is,

It’s not an easy robot. You’ll build it and you’ll be like, “my robot’s done,” and you’ll be 97.3% done and then it’s going to take the better part of the next few days to try and tune everything and just kind of adjust it a little tiny bit to make it absolutely perfect

The intention is clear. Ben Lipper wants to provide students with robots that are competitively viable that they would not be able to build otherwise, breaking G2 and R2.

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I would normally agree with you, but seeing as the Capped Pins demo CADs (before I get backlash, I know a CAD is much more in depth then pictures, however we managed to place 3rd in div at worlds in Pitching In with almost a completely hced Ben Lipper catapult bot) were told to be taken down for a very reasons (intending to provide inspiration, but leading to almost 1:1 bots existing) I see no reason why Ben Lipper sending out photos should be allowed. He’s made tutorials in the past step-by-step coding designs for 1:1 hcers and I feel it falls under the same category.

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I’m pretty sure copy his bots quite often. And I’m certain he knows about it too.

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I don’t know, I first saw it when @Entropy posted it here and VCAD discord

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I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite understand what you posted here. Could you please elaborate?

Do you have any proper evidence to back up this point?

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Yeah, there’s no possible way he doesn’t know about it from all of the people who comment on his videos about them building his robots.

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To add onto this, I’m reasonably sure (not certain so don’t take this as complete truth) that Ben Lipper has teams he “mentors” in California and a fair share of them have Lipper bots (don’t take this as complete truth as this is a combination of things I’ve been told by assorted members of the IQ community) He literally posted a max score bot in Pitching In with IN DEPTH pictures. I personally feel this has to in some way violate these rules.

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@60_Percent_C_Channel

It is never a good look to make direct accusations and “point fingers” on a public forum for robotics, even if “they caused the problem.” I politely ask that you read over the code of conduct. Thank you.

In addition:

Although he did state this in the beginning of his video, later he stated

Take it, use it as inspiration and make it your own.

THIS proves that he is sending pictures with the intention for teams to “use it as inspiration” and for them to “make it their own.” Doesn’t sound like copying to me.

So I will state once again, he does NOT endorse copying robots.

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These are a small fraction of all the comments he gets about building his robots.

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This is not going to be an easy issue to settle or eliminate.

I will start off with saying that some of the reasons that I ditched lego-based robotics and switched to VEX were:

  1. Greater focus on the technical aspects of robotics
  2. A much fairer competition system
  3. It is difficult to copy and build an identical robot

This issue of teams buying the entire “solution” or hole-count another robot has been a longstanding issue.
And I don’t think there is any way to totally eliminate it.

End of the day, the adult mentor should be responsible and ethical enough to ensure this is not happening to their teams. It should never be a win-at-all-cost approach.

But that said, I can imagine/understand (not that I agree to it) why these enrichment centres will adopt this approach - it is all about business and it is their rice bowl.

At the same time, I do think even when the RSM or EPs are doing any sort of investigation, we also need to be mindful that there are teams that got into alliances and co-designed the robot as well.
Basically what I meant is that even if we see robots from the same alliance or organisations that look the same, there are times that we will still need to give them benefits of doubt. Maybe the teams did co-designed the robots together?
And are the robots really identical? Or just similar? Is changing the chassis from wide c-channel to a narrow c-channel good enough?

And how about the official herobot? Isn’t that hole-counting as well? So where is the line to be drawn? When is hole-counting acceptable and when it is not?

My point is -there are no easy answers to all these ambiguities.
And hence the reason why I feel that the adut mentors will need to play the role of being the watchman or gatekeeper.

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what if they came up with a robot by themselves(students) and got removed from the tourney just cuz the refs though they looked similar

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He sends IN DEPTH pictures of robots to build for people. End of story. It doesn’t take incredible thought to figure out that people copy them. As I said, I placed 3rd in Division with a 1:1 hc effectively. This shouldn’t happen. Never. I have become significantly better at IQ since then and I regret every minute I spent on that robot. This year I will fix my mistakes and refuse to hc outside of design concepts. No mechanisms whatsoever just the simple ideas. That is the spirit of Vex IQ, and Ben Lipper imo actively takes away from it.

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I don’t believe the intention here is to call out any specific team for breaking G2/G4, or any specific people for encouraging it, but rather to bring awareness of it.

Yes it definitely does happen, and I feel more so these days, but that’s just me.

The official channels are really the only way to go about it, cause no one on here can do anything about it.

Naturally most designs may be similar or be built in the same principals, which is okay, blatantly copying of a design goes against what VEX is about (learning how you have design something from scratch) and it definitely not okay.