Just want to hear about what you guys think the most is innovative things about our robot that we can use for our innovate award submission for worlds. What have you guys not seen before.
A shift key, ex when L1 is pressed the intake spend forward, but when holding L2 and pressing L1, it spins it backwards. Allow us to put 6 functions on 4 buttons which keeps the drivers fingers on the joysticks.
Super fast intake, that, when bowling shoots triballs to the other side of the field to make easier match loading and to space out triballs more evenly so auton screws up less.
A PTO hang system that uses a piston to shift gears so that trying backwards spin a winch for hang.
Do the hang. The intake isn’t very unique, and the shift key is pretty innovative, but you can’t really explain much about it besides it helps the driver and how you coded it. If you explain the PTO hang you can explain much more in depth.
I like the first one (key combos). Reminds me of Mortal Kombat sort of, where they could fit a ton of “moves” in based off of key combos that could unlock special “moves”.
Legend has it, if you press up-down-x-x-r2, your intake will turn into a pressure-washer…
FYI, for a team to be eligible for the innovate award at worlds, they will need to have won one of three awards at an event that qualifies directly to the World Championships: innovate, design, or excellence.
With that being said, I would recommend you read the guide judges and see what is needed to win the innovate award. A team could have the most innovative mechanism on their robot in the world, but if they don’t have good enough documentation it’ll mean jack squat.
The only two awards that have restrictions - Excellence at Worlds must have won Excellence at a Worlds qualifying event, and Design which must have won either Excellence or Design at a World qualifying event.
All three do require having a quality engineering notebook.
As one of the criteria for the Innovate Award is that the Innovate Award winner should be among the top contenders for the Design Award, teams who earn the Innovate Award, Excellence Award, or Design Award at a World Championship Qualifying event will be eligible for those awards at the World Championship.
The CJC’s ruling trumps however you or I may interpret the Guide to Judging. I will also note that the Guide to judging that you linked specifically says the following
Note: The World Championship judging process may differ from this guide due to the scale and complexity of that event.
I feel like PTO and a toggle function aren’t even on the same magnitude of difficulty; if you wanted a fair fight the coding aspect should have been pure pursuit or soenthing
It isn’t much about the difficulty as it is the novelty. Yes, PTOs are harder, but quite a few people have already done them and there are lots of videos explaining them.
I like the toggle function because I haven’t really heard much on this for VEX. It is a simple solution for a problem, and in the engineering world, simpler is almost always the better.
I just feel like if two people built pretty much the same robot but one had a toggleable button and one of then had PTO. The latter is more innovative. Even then PTOs don’t just float in space that need to connect to something else. It’s like the equivalent to saying we are using push bottons on your robot. So I guess it depends what it’s connected to. I still think something interesting in autonomous is more innovative then about 6 if statements. Also just from a usability stand point it would ad even more mental overhead for the driver. And if you have 3d printed triggers it would pretty much add back the lost buttons but still keep it simple for a driver to pull of under stress. So that’s why I think there’s a reason why a lot of people don’t do that. If you wanted something complex for you’re driver control you could have a vision sensor that detects when a tribal is close and intakes
As a final update, I was doing a one man interview and I was the coder. I wanted to go for think award so I tried to make the interview all coding focused and I thought choosing that for my entry for innovate award would hurt my chances at think. I also heard that you need to have good documentation for innovate award and I think we have better documentation for the shift key then we had for the PTO hang because that was something we just thought of in our post state rebuild. Thanks for everyone’s suggestions, would have probably gone with PTO hang if it was documented better and the builders on my team were there to better explain it.
“Innovative” would be a team that uses correct terminology during their interview, especially at a signature event, states, or worlds where many of the judges are actual engineers. At RiverBots, one of my mechanical engineer judges commented to me about how there were so many students calling their air cylinders “pistons”
