Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I have limited experience with manipulator design, but FRC wisdom broadly states that for almost all games, the first priority in manipulating game pieces is acquiring them in the first place.

That being said, acquiring totes (and recycling containers) this year is unique because of the unusual shape of the totes. At the regional level, will active intakes (conveyors, rollers, etc. to acquire game pieces) be crucial to having a competitive robot? Or will alignment by the drivers be enough to acquire game pieces?

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

This is an interesting question. In our time trial on our tote chute build from plywood it took me about 5 seconds per tote to feed them down the chute (with the stack next to me). I imagine human players will practice this and maybe get it down some, but that is the time that robots want to achieve. If a robot can add a tote to its stack in 10 seconds, then cutting it down to 7 by adding an active intake is clearly beneficial. But if it can already stack them up 5 seconds per tote, cutting that down to 3 seconds by adding an active intake to the robot is not beneficial because the human player is the limiting factor. I do not know if these are realistic times for robots to do, I guess we'll see that at the competitions.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

Wow I did not expect those results... Lets get a fire storm going I said "No."
There is a lot to work with this year when it comes to being competitive. I just don't think you need something like an el toro (it helps) when something like a funnel and smart driving will do the same. There is a lot of room for variety when it comes to design this year and maybe somewhere some group of teams are talking and managed to decide that instead of making one active intake mechanism they have several intake mechanisms that are passive.
One of my original ideas for a robot was basically a triangle that drives into a cluster of totes. The triangle forces the totes towards a mechanism that would pick it up and stack it inside and ontop of the robot and then the other side of the triangle with nothing on it would spit the stacks out.
Re-reading this though I can see that "active intake" might need to be defined.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

i agree with most of this but the part of cutting the time down to 3 seconds, it is always beneficial especially this year with the new format to do things as quick as possible.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I sure hope not. My team is not actively seeking to design/build one (expecting the driver/drivetrain to orient the robot for optimal interface), so it sure would be disappointing if that's what limits our success.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

i agree with most of this but the part of cutting the time down to 3 seconds, it is always beneficial especially this year with the new format to do things as quick as possible.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I would say yes. Every year I can recall, robots with active gathering were the best. It insures that you have control of the totes at all times.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I don't think it'll be absolutely necessary, but I can imagine it being hugely beneficial. While I haven't tested it myself yet, but from what I've seen having an intake to grab the tightly paked totes (from varying angles) in the landfill zone could be huge.

Just my 2¢.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I really don't think this is the sort of thing that can or should be voted upon.

Recycle Rush, like all FRC games have been in the modern era, is about how many points/second your team's robot / alliance can score. The more points you score, the more competitive you are.

The robot generally goes through a cycle in order to score. Something like:
1. Move to game piece(s).
2. Pick up game piece(s).
3. Move to scoring area.
4. Score game piece(s).
5. Repeat.

How quickly do can do a cycle determines how many cycles you do which determines how many points you can score.

So when you ask, "is an active intake necessary to be competitive" the answer isn't a yes or a no. An active intake is beneficial if it decreases your cycle time. If you are able to score more cycles than the teams you are competing against you will win.

Cheers, Bryan

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I'll say no. I'd anticipate the proportion using active intakes will be quite low this year, meaning two things in my opinion: teams with good active intakes are going to have an even higher benefit from doing so, and the bar for quickly acquiring totes is likely to be quite low.

So, not necessary to be competitive, but proportionally much more beneficial than in some previous years compared to the competition.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

Very rightly stated. Intakes can be very powerful mechanisms if you are able to stack and score effectively and efficiently. However, if much time is consumed gathering totes on an intake - then you are losing time scoring.

Stacking needs to be the optimal goal. Then how you gather the tots is secondary. If you use forks or the Greenhorns design - a lot of stacking can be accomplished.

If you spend too much time creating an intake at the cost of your stacking mech - so will your gameplay suffer.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

We really want a passive tote handling design but, after dropping count less totes and studying the fall of the tote and the variability of tote falls, we have come to the conclusion that totes from the feeder station need some active help. Every team should look at several totes to see the variability and wear characteristics of totes. They at times do not like to behave just like other game pieces in the past. If we do this right the human player and the drive to the scoring area should be the limiting factor.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

Our goal is to have both the robot and the human player add a tote to our stack from the HP station in about 4 seconds or less. We are well on our way to meeting this goal. As of yet, we think that we won't need any active intake to do this.

I doubt that we'll see many floor intake robots that can make stacks this fast, even if they have an active intake.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

There are too many variables here....are you talking about robots that are designed to get totes only from the human player? or only from the landfill? or from either? How does having an active intake, compare to having a mostly self aligning "passive" intake? There are lots of ways to get ahold of totes. Some will be faster than others, and whether or not they are "active" probably won't be the only discerning factor.

I like how the yes and no votes are split pretty evenly right now....

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I'm not sure if you'd consider the system we're using an "active" intake or not. There are no rollers or such "actively" pulling the pieces to the robot. We considered such rollers, but we decided to tackle clearing the landfill as a primary goal, hoping that we could get quicker at that than the HP can feed totes. Since the landfill is so tightly packed, most active systems would be unable to get around the tote well enough to get an initial grip.

As an alternative, we are implementing an extensive (at least for us) array of sensors so that all the driver has to do is slew into a rough position and let automation take over. We'll have a pair of rangefinders so we can square up on a tote, do some vision processing to find the distinctive tote features and align left to right, and have some touch sensors on our long-side grappler (similar to the Greenhorn's Ri3d, but with a passive "foot pressor") so we know when we've made contact. We also are working on "curb feelers" to automatically square up on the edge of the scoring platform to score, and programming an extensive set of "muscle memory" actions. The neat thing is that our robot will only have five actuators -- three for the H-drive, one for the lift motor, and one for the lift pawl (or possibly a brake). Over our short history, we've found that our success is inversely proportional to the number of actuators on the robot, mostly because it means more driver practice.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I made the only options "yes" and "no" just to get a quick idea of the community's thoughts. BJC raised some good points, but now that we're so many votes in I should probably clarify:

I'm looking at active intakes from the perspective of all functions: breaking up the landfill, acquiring totes from the landfill, acquiring totes from the human player, acquiring recycling containers, etc.. Naturally there are infinite use cases based on individual robot designs, but I'm looking for a general idea of the importance of active intakes this year - for example, if your robot follows a specific strategy (e.g. feeding from the human player), then how would an active intake improve your ability to acquire totes from the human player and thus be competitive?

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I said no because they're not really necessary, however, I think that the most competitive robots will mostly have active intakes.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

If an active intake allows you to be quicker and more efficient than your passive intake, then it will make you more competitive.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

Absolutely. There are way to many designs teams could be going with for this game to draw a line of whether or not an 'active intake mechanism' is necessary at all to be competitive.

Thats kinda an odd question to pose as a poll, but I see what you were going for.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

As BJC said, if something decreases your cycle time, it's in your best competitive interest to pursue it. Obviously, resources and other limiting metrics apply here. That said, I believe most successful robots will have some component on their intake that can be defined as active.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

You might wanna rethink your priorities. You can't stack what you don't have. ;)

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

Breaking up the landfill- Passive is just fine Skip ahead to the 50 second mark.

Acquiring totes from the landfill- An active mechanism, if built right, should be more efficient than a passive mechanism. The Greenhorns claw mechanism took a very long time to line up in order to acquire a tote. If the lining up process was somehow automated as others have mentioned then I could see a passive mechanism being super efficient. However, even with this automation you generally have a smaller margin of error with a passive mechanism than an active one.

Acquiring Totes from human player: I think there are simple ways to build a passive intake mechanism that can stack totes quicker than the HP can load them.

Overall importance- I think active intake mechanisms are far from vital, yet offer an advantage. They are probably less important than they are most years IMO.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

Bottom line on this thread seems to be: speed to acquire a game piece is necessary to be competitive. An active intake is the favorite strategy to achieve this, though not the only one.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I'm not trying to disagree with you specifically, this is just something I have seen on Chiefdelphi several times and I wanted to comment on it.
You can't simply say, "if an active intake makes you quicker it makes you more competitive". Because for any improvement to a robot you have an "opportunity cost" (or, what you gave up to get it). If making your intake active takes 3 more days then a passive intake, then your opportunity cost is whatever you could have done in those three days. (3 more days of driver practice?) The real question is, "Will making an active intake make me more competitive than anything else I could have spent my time doing?"

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I firmly believe that in most cases a passive system's competitive ceiling is far lower than an active system's competitive ceiling, and thus worth the tradeoff. Will this year have that case? I guess we'll find out in 4.5 weeks.

Of course this is all put to the test when we're dealing with a lower amount of resources.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

Build a manipulator/device that takes the human element out of the equation via robot design and/or programming as much as possible.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

What's necessary to be competitive is a pair of drivers that can get the job done. Whatever makes the drivers' jobs easier helps a lot, of course, but if the drivers can get the job done without the added complexity and weight of an active mechanism, then great.

To preface: we plan on specializing in controlling containers. We have plans to be able to stack totes if necessary, but that is not our primary focus. This year, we chose not to use rollers for our manipulators because the containers and totes don't run away from you if you bump them like balls or inner-tubes do from previous years. We're confident that our drivers will be able to render the biggest advantage of an active intake pointless.

I believe that a team's success this year will hinge more on driver skill and experience than any year in recent memory, so try to get your drivers plenty of practice.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

It will, but it'll still cost you stuff. Our team decided against an active pickup - we found that (at least the ones we were capable of manufacturing) didn't improve approach angles enough to make it worth it.

--1-2 extra motors/wheels/belts/associated hardware mounted forward will make your robot tippier.
--A few person-days of effort to prototype and attach the active device will cost you driver training and debugging time on other parts of the robot.
--If your active pickup ends up being breakable (and your pickup isn't usable without it), then it adds a single point of failure on your robot. If you lose effectiveness for 1-2 matches in a season, that brings your totes-per-match average _way_ down.

To a powerhouse team it is a no-brainer: they have ample man/womanpower and cash to make it happen. To a team that has to trade training or testing time for it or skip another mechanism, it might not be the same decision.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I have to agree with Bryan. In every game you have the cycle (wash, Rinse, Repeat).
Now active is a vague term. You can have active, which allows for the robot to come to a game peice and the rollers will pull it in, and you can have an active system which assist the robot in manipulating the piece so the robot better aligned. I would think that being able to have rollers that can assist with turning totes a little, so the robot doesn't have to do fine moves, will be the biggest help. An active system that pulls in totes can be delayed if the robot has to do all the aligning first.
Good Luck and Have Fun

roger

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I have wondered about active intakes for this year's game. I think there's a good comparison of Recycle Rush and Ultimate Ascent. In 2013, you could be extremely successful by being purely a human loaded robot - no floor pickup and no active intake necessary. This year is the same but with fewer game pieces available to the human player. Also, loading from the human player will be slower.

This means that each alliance will likely require at least one robot to play without interaction with the human player. This increases value of landfill robots and recycle container robots which will likely require active intake mechanisms.

Still, pure human loaded robots won't need an active intake if they interface directly with the tote chute.

The question shouldn't be does it decrease cycle more so then another mechanism would.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I think a lot of people are defining "competitive" as being among the top teams.
I think that being "competitive" means being on a level that you can contribute to a Playoff Alliance significantly - a la Minimum Competitive Concept.
Note that a particular design can be inferior, but the robot as a whole can still be competitive.
So I don't think that this poll will be productive with different definitions floating around.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

I can think of many ways that a robot without an active intake could be a valuable contributor to an Einstein alliance.

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

Going off of this, I agree. Just adding that your time it takes to acquire totes could end up being proportional to your success but that could be any mechanism, not just intakes to bring totes under robot control.

I will say that I have seen a fair amount of robots/mechanisms that are relying on alignment of fingers in the totes...this could be trouble if your main objective was to be a open field stacker; in another role it might work a lot better. It shouldn't be an open vote but something your team went over in the first couple weeks of season and could be added later. DO NOT see it as, "Dang we missed a huge part of the game, lets scrap part of our design week 4 and make a new one using intakes...not worth it especially if it compromises everything you have already planned.
-Ronnie

Re: Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?
 

We first decided what our primary function would be. We then decided how fast we thought we'd need to be able to accomplish that primary function in order to be a top robot.

Our goal was to be able gather and stack 5/6 totes and one recycling container (all off the ground) and stack them in under 30 seconds. Recognizing that some of that time would be used simply driving the robot from spot-to-spot, we knew we needed an "aggressive" intake system and lifter. So, we told our engineering team that we needed the acquiring and lifting mechanisms to accomplish the following in about one second:
* Grab totes and bins (even if not perfectly lined-up)
* Bring them in to the stack (we have an internal-bottom stacker).
* Lift the item just over 12 inches, to prepare for the next tote.

We found several ways to accomplish this, but they all had one commonality: They had some sort of active "grabbing" mechanism on the intake. Every possibility that we studied that did not have such a mechanism was not going to be able to gain control of the totes fast enough to satisfy our speed goals.
Could it be done? I dunno. We are always looking for super-simple ways to accomplish things. We just didn't find it this time.

No, the robot is not finished yet, so we really don't know if we have accomplished the goals... However, so far it is on track to do so. Hopefully we'll know by next weekend.....