My team decided tipping the bridge was important, however the weight allocated to doing so was reduced to roughly five pounds for tipping the bridge, a ball scraper to get balls of walls and from under bridges, as well as a moveable ramp on the back of our elevator that allows balls to enter from the inbounder station.
This left me with around 2-3 pounds to tip the bridge as fast and as passive as possible. 10 designs later with the help of many free body diagrams and some tests our 2 pound tipper was born. The two pounds includes the weight of the air cylinders and everything else needed.
The result was a bar of 1by1 AL that is rotated down using a 3/4'' bore, 4 inch stroke air cylinder. Then a over center clamp is rotated over it by a 3/4'' bore , 2 inch air cylinder. Once we fixed some problems with our swerve drive software and could go straight on to the bridge it worked perfectly. However the only problem we have had with this design is currently software has a long delay before the over center will come down. So sometimes we will ram the bridge without the over center clamp on and it will not tip the bridge. However this is an easy fix.
