Re: Gears on the floor?
 

Also, ground intakes may have a quicker cycle time depending on the driver. If there's a gear on the floor outside of the loading station, the robot does not need to line up correctly with the chute. Instead it can, like a ball, just drive up to the gear laying on the floor. The time efficiency would range depending on drivers, but when you need 12 gears any time saving will help.

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

Yes. Especially if there are many of them in one area.

Yes. I foresee a large number of robots with low ground clearance this year.

Yes. It is almost always worthwhile to have the option to pick up a game piece off the floor.

Maybe. With a little creativity I think that the size restrictions can be worked around without too much complexity. You are only saving time if the floor pickup you design is faster than your cycle times. Don't bother picking up off of the floor if it is going to take you half the match to do it.

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

I'm picturing lurking just out of sight behind the airship and swooping in to tag drivers who are preoccupied with the bait gear on the floor :)

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

Gears on the floor could be an alliance strategy, where a great gear handler from the floor gets gears delivered to them by their partners. Of course, once they are on the ground, the opponents can play defense on them but they are harder to clear away than balls and they can only possess one at a time. Getting as many as possible to your side (even on the ground) and having a good pickup and placement mechanism would make it feasible for a single robot to place 12 gears if their partners were delivering them to the launchpad area.

I imagine you'd have 3 gears on robots and the reserve to start. At least one would be scored in auto and any left at the start of teleop would be dumped in the launchpad. Then all 3 robots would go for 3 more gears (and fuel). At that point, the gear handler would have 5 gears to place bringing the total to 7. Repeat this twice more (or 3x with 2 robots) and you'd be at 13.

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

Keep in mind a good gear floor pickup greatly decreases travel time to acquire a gear and you need 12 for RP. it takes a while with across field vision to even obtain a gear. Would be much better to scoop fallen ones closer up. Plus greatly eases load time no line up needed human just drops gear on floor robot gets.... I think floor pickup of gears is a must due to cycle times for top gear bots considering driver station views, distance, defense and the rest. bots that just have passive gear collection will struggle IMO

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

FRC Design rule #4 you must be able to pickup your primary scoring object off of the floor.

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

I think having an intake would be great and it'd be helpful for sure. No gears would be wasted! Hard part is picking the gears off the floor and having time to score points everywhere else... I feel like going around picking up dropped gears would take a lot of time if there were a decent amount of them falling throughout the match... maybe that's just me though... :yikes:

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

This is the real question.

Most of the designs I've seen so far on Twitter are a basically a funneled cup shape. Once the gear is in, it would take a pretty massive shakeup to drop it.

The two places where you're going to see dropped gears are at the receiving station, and at the lift. I'm not sure you'll see many dropped gears anywhere else.

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

That's true. The amount's definitely important. Spend time making an intake and gears are rarely dropped on the floor... that wouldn't be good.

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

Decent floor pickup and your Human Player to drop gears on floor rather than robot having to line up and waste time , so there will be as many gears on the floor as you need you never have to waste time with a line up..its the way to go. Too many gears too little time. More engineering sure, worth it yes.

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

Better take back that division win from 1503 in 2011, and a good deal of division and championships wins from teams in 2006.

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

Plus more than half of Einstein 2013...

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

I don't uderstand the love for picking up gears off the floor in this thread. Unless you have an amazing floor pickup picking up gears from the floor still takes time, maybe less than if you were loading from a loading station but time none the less. I wouldn't be surprised if a well practiced gear scorer was able to to go to the loading station, grab a gear and score it before an average robot could score one picked off the ground next to the airship.

In 2013 two of the world champions had intakes during regional play and removed them for championship even though they were necessary for a fairly common high scoring auton. It's not like ground intakes were undervalued that year either considering there were ultra competitive teams who only had the option of picking up from the ground (2056 notably)

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

2450 did some CAD modeling to pick up the gear. I wish the gear had a large chamfer to get a "dustpan" under it while laying flat. Fairly sharp corner on carpet that probably cant be scooped up.

Ideas welcomed.

Re: Gears on the floor?
 

I think you might be underestimating Vision and defense..... going to exact same spot is of course a tendency and you can be if you are very effective at gear collection that tendency will be used against you and slow you down a lot when you need 6...at least with floor the pickup point will be different and you could have several gears laying on floor pretty sure you can chuck the gears out at a high rate forcing them away from the retrieval area and being more unpredictable in picking them up

Only downside (with scoops) I see to floor pickup is trying to no get messed up with balls which will be prevalent