The Innovate Award: Ingenuity in Action

The Innovate Award often gets confused with the Design Award. What’s the difference?

• Design Award: The robot is a well-oiled machine. It looks good, works good, and is reliable.
• Innovate Award: The robot has that one thing that makes judges go, “Whoa, I didn’t think of that.”

It celebrates the spark of imagination. It’s about thinking outside the box—or in this year’s DECODE season, thinking outside the perimeter.

Finding Your “Spark”

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel (literally). Innovation can be:

1. A Unique Mechanism: “We built a Differential Swerve Module.” (Okay, that’s really hard, but it’s innovative).
2. A Clever Solution to a Common Problem: “We used surgical tubing knots to create variable friction on our intake.”
3. Material Usage: “We 3D printed a flexible TPU bumper that doubles as a shock absorber.”
4. Software Innovation: “We used a custom computer vision model to detect opponent orientation.”

Qualifying the “Elegance”

The award criteria mention “Elegance.” In engineering, elegance means simple, effective, and clever.

• Bad Innovation: A complex 15-servo arm that barely works. That’s “Rube Goldberg,” not innovation.
• Good Innovation: A passive gravity-fed sorting system that uses zero motors. That’s elegant.

Documenting Innovation

You can’t just be innovative; you have to explain why it’s innovative.

1. The “Before and After”

Show the standard way of doing things. “Most teams use buying slides.” Then show YOUR way. “We designed a custom compact linkage that fits in half the space.” Explain the Benefit. “This allowed us to fit a second battery/intake/camera.”

2. The Inspiration

Where did the idea come from? Did you see it on a factory robot? A Mars Rover? A 3D printer mechanism? Citing your real-world inspiration gives your design gravitas.

3. The Iteration

Innovation involves risk. Show the failures. “Version 1 shattered. Version 2 was too heavy. Version 3 used a lattice structure to reduce weight by 40% while maintaining strength.”

[!TIP] Highlight It: Put a giant sticker or color-coded part on your innovative mechanism. When the robot is on the field, you want the judges to look exactly where you want them to look.

Leveraging Tools

Innovation is also about using modern tools.

Use FTC Coach to upload images of your custom mechanisms. It can help you describe them using industry-standard terminology, making your “cool part” sound like a “revolutionary engineering achievement.”

Conclusion

The Innovate Award is for the dreamers who actually build. Don’t be afraid to try something crazy. Just make sure you document why it’s crazy smart.