My team has stuck almost completely to the Human Loading station. We have the capability to use the auto loading station, but in terms of reliability and speed the human loading station is just faster.
I'm pretty sure my team had one of the faster human players in FIRST. I was going through some of my teams video of our last regional and counted how long it took for him to load a tetra on. He averaged about 1.3 seconds from when the robot shut off to when the robot was re-enabled. We nicknamed him the blur.
Now that being said, I do think going to the auto loading station is useful. My team has devised a method that we think will work and ease our picking up of tetras at the auto-loaders. (namely ramming the wall to make sure we're straight
).
Either way, I present The Blur: