[Chris is me]

Sure-grip drive rollers, as they're called on McMaster, come in several different sizes, durometers, and materials that vary in effectiveness depending on the task. The white nitrile wheels were great in 2013 for shooting frisbees, but less so for gripping game pieces in either 2014 or 2015. In 2015 they were good enough for a human load robot, but not good enough to play the landfill well compared to other wheel choices. The polyurethane version of these wheels, while pricier, got the job done a lot better this year.

I think the solid blue polyurethane drive rollers from McMaster are ultimately more useful in FRC, as they have excellent grip on a variety of materials. After extensive testing they were the only wheels that could grip frisbees as well (or slightly better) than the old blue Banebot wheels.

Both wheels are expensive and come with a large-bore steel hub that you'll need to press an aluminum insert into. You can fiddle with / modify certain COTS products (VersaHubs, etc) to fit in certain cases, but the best solution is really to turn down your own hub on a lathe. You could probably print and broach a plastic hub too if you wanted. With an aggressively lightened aluminum hub we got the solid wheels within .25 lbs of a Banebots wheel each, so weight isn't prohibitive.

The price is... a lot, but if you're trying to get the best intake in FRC, you're going to spend a few hundred bucks testing out materials and geometries that will never work, and that's just something you have to accept. Intake prototyping is expensive.