This one will bake your noodle, I dont think it gets much more radical than this....
Kit is released, teams have 6 weeks to build a robot to perform the game challenge. Competition begins...the qualification round structure is as follows.
Qualification Round 1: Team A + B vs Team C + D
Team A: Drives Team B's Robot
Team B: Drives Team A's Robot
Team C: Drives Team D's Robot
Team D: Drives Team C's Robot
Ipes! You don't mean? We have to let other people control what we build? Thus deciding our fate?
Oh yes...
Here is why. In many cases in the real world, you have to design product for use by other parties. Doing this in the game would make for teams to not only come up with a solid engineering design, but also ease of control and learnability. It would promote more team interactivity before and during rounds, as well as hopefully promoting teams to reach out to struggling teams in the pit, and help them if they are having issues.
Elimination structure would remain essentially the same...
Top 8 Teams select 2 alliance partners. Best 2 out of 3 in rounds. Robots do the ol' switcharoo once again in each round...with the exception of the final round, where all teams must drive their own robot!
I think the whole selection and elimination would add a very interesting twist. Imagine teams having to not only base selection on the strength of robot, but also on the driver skills and fast learning abilities of teams.
Very evil if you ask me...I kinda like it
-Andy Grady