Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
My team won the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control award for a tracking and firing autonomous camera mode we never used on field...
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This happens all of the time with technical awards (and for that matter, non-technical awards). We've all seen teams get trophies for things that didn't quite work right, or that they didn't even use. And we've all seen dominating bots with ingenious features go unrecognized.
Of course, this happens because of the enormous amount of information that our volunteer judges must process. 50+ teams at a regional, each with a robot, pit display, and a half dozen to a dozen on field performances crammed into two days of judging is a lot to reconcile.
I think that more explicit separation of robot awards designed to reward effective on field performance (autonomous modes, awesome manipulators, overall design) and technical innovation (design processes, materials usage) would help. I also think that technical judges who are more closely involved with FRC, who understand where "the bar" is set and know when what a team is saying about their robot sounds fishy would be a great aid to those Regionals that do not yet use such judges.