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As teams start the integration process I think many will realize the true difficulty of fuel. These balls aren't small relative to the robot and holding a large amount while still being able to properly index and feed them consistently to a shooter at a high rate of fire is going to be difficult.
I'd bet many teams at this point have prototyped shooters capable of firing 5+ balls per second but haven't spent nearly as much time feeding the balls at that rate. With limited space this year stacking just 10 balls for auton is difficult to package in a "do everything robot"
A case study we often looked at on my team was 254's 2013 robot. It was by all accounts a great "do everything" robot, good shooter, good intake and a sweet climber but it's indexing mechanism held it back severely in the upper levels of competition due to its relatively low rate of fire. This was probably a result of limited options in the packaging/integration stage of design. In the end much simpler robots were able to be more competitive.
My prediction is a lot of upper middle tier robots will shoot at a high rate of fire with low consistency due to poor feeding which may be fine for teleop but will struggle in auton or shoot 3-8 indexed balls at a high rate of fire and then significantly slow down as un indexed balls feed into the indexing system. Although there will definitely be teams who are all able to overcome this.
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2014-2015: FRC 865 Warp7 Team Captain
2016: FRC 865 Mentor
2017: Free Agent Mentor, Inspector
Last edited by mman1506 : 18-01-2017 at 09:47.
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