Hi, as far as getting the tote to land perfectly without it touching anything but the chute, I'd say it comes pretty much down to luck. Our human tried a lot of different things like angling the tote in the chute and hitting the tote with the door on the way out to slow it down. None of these techniques yielded a desirable outcome. :/
However, we are able to get the totes out of the chute perfectly every time without touching them with our robot. Well, technically it does touch our robot. We built a table that sits in front of the chute that catches the totes and lets them land perfectly every time. This table is tethered to our robot so we can move independently from it #teamtether. We call it "El Stackador"
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8z...ew?usp=sharing
Now, obviously this won't work for you if you are usually picking up from the ground. What you might want to try is building just the top of the table and sitting it on the ground where the totes land, possibly with an open front if your robot sucks the totes in from the front. I know team 3310 has a similar mechanism that acts like the top of our table, but it fold down from the front of their robot.
Good luck,
-3481