[EricH]

It depends on the application, of course. However, in general, there are also two types of applications.

1) Precision Placement. 2005, 2007, 2011 come to mind, as well as the 2008 endgame. In this, you're trying to place something on something else with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

2) In the Big Hole. Shooting-type games tend to land in this category, just put a lot of projectiles on the target.


Generally, precision placement games will lend themselves for a gripper-type pickup. (If you're going to lump roller claws into "continuous", you need to make sure that you're ONLY lumping the rollers in to use your own definition consistently. I'd consider them hybrid; it's a gripper with a continuous in-feed.) And yes, some of the best pick-and-place robots out there have used gripper-type claws without any sort of continuous component.

On the other hand, "big hole" games will tend to call for a continuous pickup to acquire ammunition for the massive shot at the target. Aerial Assist, due to only one gamepiece, was a slight exception, but most of the successful teams tended to use continuous.

And then there are the hybrids. Often, a given challenge will call for something that neither grippers nor continuous can completely provide. That's when life gets interesting, as you try to figure out whether to add a continuous to a gripper or vice versa, and automate the whole thing... I'll pick on 1197 this last year as having a hybrid. The initial intake was continuous, but if the storage/secondary intake wasn't in the right place the ball was then useless, putting it more in a gripper class. (Some clever code made the positioning automatic, or very nearly automatic, when the driver pressed the right button.) If both were in the right place, everybody within 15 feet of the sides of the field knew when they hit a ball they wanted as it smacked into the back of the storage...