In regards to who wins what awards at Championships, I don't know that embedded control systems (such as feed-forward) are the only subject where the Innovation in Control is aimed. It's pretty broad in scope. I'll also echo Andrew's sentiments about students explaining and demo'ing the technical side on a live robot.
We won Innovation in Control on Galileo for an
on-goggle HUD that displayed real-time telemetry to the driver without distracting her. It was similar in functionality and design challenges to the F-35 helmet. Rockwell Collins delivered that helmet to the F-35 program mere weeks after Champs, so I'm guessing that's why they were so impressed by the HUD. We got to meet a few of the executives at Champs to demo it to them.
I read earlier this season of a team who won the award in their division for their open-sourced command-based Java code architecture. Can't seem to find the CD post at the moment.