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Re: What are the advantages of placing gears vs waiting for them to be lifted?
I am still struggling with any broad appeal for an active mechanism. If the main benefit is speed, the one clear place it has a potential advantage is high-level autonomous matches. If you're designing for a high competitive level in which all 3 robots could place gears at essentially the same* time in autonomous and then potentially immediately move on to do something else, it helps to not need a pilot on hand. This will be exceedingly rare: even at high levels, many alliances will choose to run 2-gear autonomous routines or have their 2nd pick deliver the gear and not move from there (thus they can wait until a pilot is free). But if you think you want to leave the airship in autonomous faster than 2 pilots can take all 3 gears--and you think you'll be in that position--then active release is clearly the correct answer.
Outside of that, the time differential is less impressive. The likelihood that all 3 robots are placing a gear simultaneously in teleop is minimal and not preferable for most traffic flow plans. You also don't want to leave without confirming you have the pilot's attention, and the gap between attention and lifting needs to be minimized anyway just in terms of pilot scoring. This is a year where these students absolutely must be top-notch; there are strong cases in which I'd pull a team off my picklist if their HPs (pilots/loaders) were underperforming.
As far as reliability, the main issue is that if you're trying not to drop something (and you are), it's much safer to have the reciever lift it up rather than the giver drop it off. This I hope is less of an issue though, since if you're really operating at a level where active is important, you should already have the engineering capability to ensure this and weigh it in your risk-benefit.
Basically this isn't to say that active gear releases are flatly pointless. I do think they're pointless or detrimental for most teams. But if you're actually engineering an active mechanism that will be faster and more reliable than an Nth percentile pilot you'd encounter in that given situation-- and you have nothing better to put that energy toward--more power to you. For the rest of us schmucks, the appeal of a big "Hey look at me!" LED light/sound show is a lot more straightforward to me. (Red = "I'm coming at you!", Green = "Lift! I'm ready and I have someplace to be!")
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