4761 used several
photoelectric sensors donated by Rockwell Automation to automate our tote loading at the human player station. Our robot was basically made of two conveyors, one being able to move up and down along extrusion rails to reach different heights, the other being stationary on the bottom of the robot. We had a break-beam emitter and receiver pair at opposite sides of the moving conveyor to detect when a tote was completely on the conveyor, a few diffuse sensors along the extrusion to detect different heights for the conveyor to move to, and another break-beam set on the main conveyor at the ground level of the robot to detect when a tote was completely off of the moving conveyor. All our operator did was press and hold a button while we were at the chute and the robot loaded the totes for us slightly faster than our human player could send the totes through the chute.
Here's a video of the whole routine in action
We also tried automating the moving conveyor to move to the top of any stack with the press of a button using one of the diffuse sensors to make for quicker stacking/ capping but it wasn't as reliable as we wanted it to be.
Our robot didn't have these sensors originally and each component was manually moved by the operator. After we added these features between districts, I was amazed by the power of automating features in the robot. In my opinion, we went from being one of the slower robots to being able to keep up with most of the robots at the competitions we attended.