Robot Capabilities
The 2018 - 2019 VEX Robotics Competition game Turning Point required players to toggle flags among other game elements. There were nine flags total: three bottom flags that could be toggled by the robot, and the six high flags that could only be toggled by hitting them with competition ball game pieces. Competition teams needed to come up with a way to hit the higher flags using a ball launcher. If you can imagine, programming the robot to hit the flags using ball game pieces by measuring may not always be accurate. If the robot makes one wrong turn during the autonomous period, there is a possibility that none of the flags would be hit because the calculations would be off. Similarly, for the Driving Skills challenge, it may be hard for teams to manually line up the robot enough to launch the ball properly.
VEX Robotics Competition games often use different colored game elements and so, a great advantage would be to design a robot with a Vision Sensor. In the Turning Point game, for example, a Vision Sensor could have been used to detect flags and then align the robot properly in order to make accurate shots. It is important to note that Vision Sensors are sensitive to the lighting in different environments. In competition settings, there is time to tune the Vision Sensor and tuning the Vision Sensor is an important practice that teams should adopt.