We originally went with a forklift design for our grabber. But when we got to competition, we found it was to hard to line up to the auto loader and it was not compatible with the human player.
So on Thursday of SAC we came up with a pneumatic that pushes out to hook the tetra, then retracts to let the tetra slide off. But the pneumatic shaft got bent. So down goes design numero dos.
Our third (and luckily final) design is a simple hook with rods coming out either side to stabilize the tetra. It works reasonbly well, but it isn't as good as a well thought out grabber would be. Everything turned out ok though, we played defense for our alliance and got to the finals for the first time in our team's ten year history.
