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Originally Posted by Ty Tremblay
I'm not 100% sure I follow. If you're extending your hopper with your collector, you negate the effects of making your frame smaller while still gaining the advantages of an over-the-bumper collector.
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The primary advantage of an over-the-bumper collector, other than width (which is significant), is that the leading edge of your robot is your collector instead of your frame and/or bumper. If you move your "frame" (hopper) out just as far forward as your collector, you remove that advantage - your frame could contact a wall before your collector contacts a ball along that wall, etc. If your roller still protrudes out farther than your hopper, then you have to at least some extent compromised your hopper space.
Considering even a full length robot can actuate their front roller so that it occupies the space between the frame and the edge of the bumper, this advantage starts to seem limited to making the collector wider. Again, this is a sizeable advantage, but at the same time, the field will have hundreds of balls on it, and I'm not sure the complexity of this solution is justified for this benefit.
It's not zero benefit, and it's certainly worth exploring for many teams, I just wonder if the tradeoff in complexity and / or ball storage will end up being clearly worth it or not. This isn't the path my team took and it certainly simplified a lot of the robot once we decided not to do this, plus we still have the option to switch to a drop-down "in-the-bumper" intake if we really need that little bit of roller to grab balls against walls.