Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

I just want to take this time and thank all the amazing volunteers who traveled to Texas to help out at this event. We had an all-star crew of volunteers including some of the biggest names in the robotics community. It was great to see all these people come together and help make the 2009 VEX Robotics World Championship a resounding success!

For the full results please visit:

http://www.vexrobotics.com/champions...09/results.php

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

I had a great time watching the Science Division matches and some of the elims. Does anyone have pictures of some of the winning robots? I was amazed at some of the uniqueness of the designs and how well they performed.

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

I had a blast. We took six teams to Championships: 417, 418, 419, 420, 575, and 1899. Team 1899 competes in FRC with their high school, and in VRC with Exothermic Robotics Club. I worked all day Thursday as an inspector with Rick Kressley, Paul Copioli, Mike Martus and other nice people whose names have escaped me, and had fun talking to the teams -- most of whom seemed to think it was my job to disqualify their robot. They seemed surprised that the inspectors were being nice. My favorite inspector's moment: I found a robot that was too big to fit in the sizing box. Normally, a team goes away and either repositions some components or saws off a bit of robot. In this case, their mentor grabbed their arm and BENT it with his hands. The robot now fit, but I sure don't know how well it worked after that. The guy was strong.

Our students had a good time, earned some trophies, experienced tragic failure, and achieved some great successes. In other words, it was a robotics tournament. After having a bunch of PWM cables ripped out by another robot's belts which were stuck into the middle of their robot and then switched on, team 419 started say, "That's robots!" I think our team has added our third catch phrase, to go along with "It was on fire when we got there" and "stop, STOP, STOP!!!"

Check out the galleries on the Vex forum. More and more pictures are showing up: http://www.vexforum.com/gallery/index.php

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

Here are a few statistics from the event.

1. In all 262 MS/HS teams and 13 college teams participated

2. Between the MS/HS and College Competitions 284 of 293 robots were fully inspected by the time pits closed on Thursday. The remaining 9 passed inspection Friday morning before opening ceremonies began. The count includes 26 college robots and 5 secondary robots for the MS/HS Programming Skills Challenge to go along with the 262 primary robots built by the MS/HS teams.

3. A total of 424 MS/HS matches were run on Fri & Sat adding up qualifying, division finals, and championship finals with a cycle time that averaged sub 3:30 for the bulk of the weekend. Of these 424 alliance matches, only 8 (or 1.99%) needed to be replayed - 3 for one mechanically failed crystal, 1 for a camera inadvertently damaging a robot, 2 for minor field issues, 1 for a communication error on the match starter's/emcee's part, and 1 for an unintentional team issue resulting in an unintended, yet unfair advantage.

4. An additional 75 college matches were run utilizing the new VEXnet, next generation communication system. I don't have the number of skills challenge matches that we ran either, but I do want to acknowledge those too.

How is all of this possible in such a short time frame with a limited number of people? As Karthik said earlier, it was an AMAZING group of combined staff and volunteers. Inspectors and our on field Refs (the folks I helped coordinate) were nothing less than stellar and our pit admin was the most rock solid "home base" I've had the pleasure of working with at an event. There scorers and scoring software were the best in the business. Not only do these guys develop a robust, elegant, and flexible product, but they show up and run it for you too. On site from the community to help out were 3 WFAs, 8 WFFAs, six present/former FIRST Senior Mentors/RDs, entire FIRST families, representatives from at least five FRC Hall of fame teams, at least five FRC championship teams, etc.

Personally, here's my incomplete (if I miss you, it's not intentional - my apologies) list of folks I was honored to serve the VRC Worlds with this past weekend:

The ENTIRE IFI staff (especially my good friends JVN and Karthik), Dave Scheck, Dave Flowerday, Mike Soukup, Paul Copioli, Chris Hibner, Mike Martus, John Novak, Meredith Novak, all the Novaks, Rhona Breadner, Emerald Church, Dan Green, Rick Tyler, Greg Needel, Paul Kloberg, Dan Larochelle (and the Rest of Intelitek support), Dave Lavery, Joe Vanderway, Mark Leon, Pat Fairbank, Todd Willick, The Nobles, and probably a dozen more I don't remember right now.

Wow ... it almost made me depressed to leave for home .... :D

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

We ran well over 400 Skills Challenge matches, bringing the total in the course of 2 days to nearly 1000 competition matches! That's not even counting practice matches!

I'd add to your list of people to thank Chris Noble, Cis Noble, and the rest of the volunteers running the skills challenges. They were short-staffed the entire weekend due to volunteers who weren't able to make it and did a great job with an overwhelming task.

I had a great time at this event. IFI definitely has a winner with their VEX product - I heard that 200 teams are already signed up for the 09/10 season. The VEXnet communications system worked really well and has a lot of potential to make all these matches run even faster (if the volunteers can keep up!).

Also, the wrap party was simply awesome. The Arc Attack show was perfect for the audience, and was one of the neatest things I've ever seen. The food was really great and the staff was friendly. It was by far the best robot competition team party I've been to in the past 8 years.

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

I heartily agree with all the praises posted above for this event. It was pure pleasure to be a part of such a tremendous and professionally-run tournament. I am totally amazed at how many matches were run and how few problems and delays we encountered. I think we ran matches until 7pm on Friday and we were on schedule! I just wish I had a picture of my daughter Riley when I told her at about match #90 that we were going through match #141 on the first day.

My only disappointment or complaint about the entire weekend is that JVN stuffed JTN inside of "Tornado" late in the day and my camera battery was dead :ahh:

All 5 of the Novaks had a great time - thanks for inviting us!

-

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

I'll second this one. I spent almost the entire weekend behind the scorer's table and any time I needed anything, it was delivered in minutes.

Whenever I looked out at the three main arena fields, I was reminded how they could not have operated without the Novak family.

Seconded. This was the best team party I've been to. Better than Atlanta, even better than Disney. The food was great. The layout was great. The Ark Attack show was entertaining and awe-inspiring at the same time, an excellent mix of music and technology.

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

I definitely had a blast at the VEX World Championship, refereeing and hanging out with the Simbots. It was a pleasure to work with the star-studded volunteer crew, and also great to meet the trio of Wildstang guys who put together a rock solid scoring system (and weren't half bad at running it, either). The venue setup was fantastic, and the whole event, especially the elimination rounds, had a very slick and professional feel. Even the 18" sizing boxes were so nice-looking that my reffing partner Ryan "Scoot" Shaw and I felt compelled to make use of them on the field a whole bunch. I'll also throw in my agreement that the wrap party was epic.

I'll be back next year for sure.

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

Wow. That's the most impressive list of volunteer staff I've ever seen. That's nuts. I so need to attend next year.:yikes:

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

I thought some of you might enjoy seeing this video of VRC 575 running its "43-point" Programming Skills Challenge routine. In this video, a cube takes a bad bounce and leaves them with 37 points, but you will see it could make 43 or 44 points. This robot had the highest PSC score at Worlds with 37 points, running their safer "37-point" auto.

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

That is AWESOME! I thought that the skills challenge was the coolest new feature of the VEX championship. I wish FIRST would do something like this. The drivers' challenge is a cool idea and the programming challenge is also extremely cool. I love it.

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

Here's a video of team 2213a from Puerto Rico scoring 60 points in the robot skills challenge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1FY4vNx8as

Re: 2009 VEX World Championship
 

After reading the Vex forum and watching my own teams practice, I thought that as many as 10 teams might do 60 point scores in the RSC. I was surprised at the actual results. Neither of our teams that did 60 on our practice field repeated the feat at Dallas. The drive team from 2213a had ice water in their veins. Nicely done.