Quote:
Originally Posted by MICHAELABICK
I think building a competitive roller intake was one of the hardest challenges this year. Our team for example trashed our intake design midseason, after spending many, many hours prototyping. However many teams still built fast intakes, despite our team's troubles. What were the challenges that your team faced in building an intake? What designs overcame these issues? What designs led to the fastest, most consistent roller intakes?
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33’s primary design objectives for our intake were:
1. Had to be two disks wide for the 7 disk auto.
2. Had to be extremely fast (469 in 2012 was our benchmark)
3. Had to be able to properly function over wrinkles/tape on the carpet.
We had a very successful prototype using an overhead roller and spatula. However, this didn’t meet our 3rd functional objective.
Recognizing that the key to intaking was getting the leading edge of the disk off the floor we began prototyping a counter rotating bottom roller. This resulted in a second very successful prototype using a 3/8” fiberglass rod sleeved with surgical tubing. However, the very tight dimensional restrictions (54” cylinder) meant that this design was almost impossible to package.
Because of packaging constraints we began prototyping large diameter bottom rollers. These evolved to have “fingers” and we ended up with AndyMark stars cut down slightly.
The final intake pretty much met all of our objectives. We consistently averaged 6 disks in auto throughout the season, and the collector functioned properly up to about 1/2” off the ground and wasn’t affected by tape or carpet wrinkles. It didn’t quite meet the 469 in 2012 requirement but it was still good enough that we never had to wait around for disks to enter the robot.
Photo by Dan Ernst