Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?

[NWChen]

I have limited experience with manipulator design, but FRC wisdom broadly states that for almost all games, the first priority in manipulating game pieces is acquiring them in the first place.

That being said, acquiring totes (and recycling containers) this year is unique because of the unusual shape of the totes. At the regional level, will active intakes (conveyors, rollers, etc. to acquire game pieces) be crucial to having a competitive robot? Or will alignment by the drivers be enough to acquire game pieces?

[PowerfulKitty]

This is an interesting question. In our time trial on our tote chute build from plywood it took me about 5 seconds per tote to feed them down the chute (with the stack next to me). I imagine human players will practice this and maybe get it down some, but that is the time that robots want to achieve. If a robot can add a tote to its stack in 10 seconds, then cutting it down to 7 by adding an active intake is clearly beneficial. But if it can already stack them up 5 seconds per tote, cutting that down to 3 seconds by adding an active intake to the robot is not beneficial because the human player is the limiting factor. I do not know if these are realistic times for robots to do, I guess we'll see that at the competitions.

[who716]

Originally Posted by PowerfulKitty

This is an interesting question. In our time trial on our tote chute build from plywood it took me about 5 seconds per tote to feed them down the chute (with the stack next to me). I imagine human players will practice this and maybe get it down some, but that is the time that robots want to achieve. If a robot can add a tote to its stack in 10 seconds, then cutting it down to 7 by adding an active intake is clearly beneficial. But if it can already stack them up 5 seconds per tote, cutting that down to 3 seconds by adding an active intake to the robot is not beneficial because the human player is the limiting factor. I do not know if these are realistic times for robots to do, I guess we'll see that at the competitions.

i agree with most of this but the part of cutting the time down to 3 seconds, it is always beneficial especially this year with the new format to do things as quick as possible.

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

I sure hope not. My team is not actively seeking to design/build one (expecting the driver/drivetrain to orient the robot for optimal interface), so it sure would be disappointing if that's what limits our success.

[Munchskull]

I would say yes. Every year I can recall, robots with active gathering were the best. It insures that you have control of the totes at all times.

[Gdeaver]

We really want a passive tote handling design but, after dropping count less totes and studying the fall of the tote and the variability of tote falls, we have come to the conclusion that totes from the feeder station need some active help. Every team should look at several totes to see the variability and wear characteristics of totes. They at times do not like to behave just like other game pieces in the past. If we do this right the human player and the drive to the scoring area should be the limiting factor.

[MrForbes]

There are too many variables here....are you talking about robots that are designed to get totes only from the human player? or only from the landfill? or from either? How does having an active intake, compare to having a mostly self aligning "passive" intake? There are lots of ways to get ahold of totes. Some will be faster than others, and whether or not they are "active" probably won't be the only discerning factor.

I like how the yes and no votes are split pretty evenly right now....

[NWChen]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

There are too many variables here....are you talking about robots that are designed to get totes only from the human player? or only from the landfill? or from either?

I made the only options "yes" and "no" just to get a quick idea of the community's thoughts. BJC raised some good points, but now that we're so many votes in I should probably clarify:

I'm looking at active intakes from the perspective of all functions: breaking up the landfill, acquiring totes from the landfill, acquiring totes from the human player, acquiring recycling containers, etc.. Naturally there are infinite use cases based on individual robot designs, but I'm looking for a general idea of the importance of active intakes this year - for example, if your robot follows a specific strategy (e.g. feeding from the human player), then how would an active intake improve your ability to acquire totes from the human player and thus be competitive?

[asid61]

I said no because they're not really necessary, however, I think that the most competitive robots will mostly have active intakes.

[Anupam Goli]

If an active intake allows you to be quicker and more efficient than your passive intake, then it will make you more competitive.

[Joseph1825]

Originally Posted by Anupam Goli

If an active intake allows you to be quicker and more efficient than your passive intake, then it will make you more competitive.

I'm not trying to disagree with you specifically, this is just something I have seen on Chiefdelphi several times and I wanted to comment on it.
You can't simply say, "if an active intake makes you quicker it makes you more competitive". Because for any improvement to a robot you have an "opportunity cost" (or, what you gave up to get it). If making your intake active takes 3 more days then a passive intake, then your opportunity cost is whatever you could have done in those three days. (3 more days of driver practice?) The real question is, "Will making an active intake make me more competitive than anything else I could have spent my time doing?"

[Ginger Power]

Originally Posted by NWChen

I'm looking at active intakes from the perspective of all functions: breaking up the landfill, acquiring totes from the landfill, acquiring totes from the human player, acquiring recycling containers, etc.. Naturally there are infinite use cases based on individual robot designs, but I'm looking for a general idea of the importance of active intakes this year - for example, if your robot follows a specific strategy (e.g. feeding from the human player), then how would an active intake improve your ability to acquire totes from the human player and thus be competitive?

Breaking up the landfill- Passive is just fine Skip ahead to the 50 second mark.

Acquiring totes from the landfill- An active mechanism, if built right, should be more efficient than a passive mechanism. The Greenhorns claw mechanism took a very long time to line up in order to acquire a tote. If the lining up process was somehow automated as others have mentioned then I could see a passive mechanism being super efficient. However, even with this automation you generally have a smaller margin of error with a passive mechanism than an active one.

Acquiring Totes from human player: I think there are simple ways to build a passive intake mechanism that can stack totes quicker than the HP can load them.

Overall importance- I think active intake mechanisms are far from vital, yet offer an advantage. They are probably less important than they are most years IMO.

[GeeTwo]

Bottom line on this thread seems to be: speed to acquire a game piece is necessary to be competitive. An active intake is the favorite strategy to achieve this, though not the only one.

[dellagd]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

There are too many variables here....are you talking about robots that are designed to get totes only from the human player? or only from the landfill? or from either? How does having an active intake, compare to having a mostly self aligning "passive" intake? There are lots of ways to get ahold of totes. Some will be faster than others, and whether or not they are "active" probably won't be the only discerning factor.

I like how the yes and no votes are split pretty evenly right now....

Absolutely. There are way to many designs teams could be going with for this game to draw a line of whether or not an 'active intake mechanism' is necessary at all to be competitive.

Originally Posted by NWChen

If your robot follows a specific strategy (e.g. feeding from the human player), then how would an active intake improve your ability to acquire totes from the human player and thus be competitive?

Thats kinda an odd question to pose as a poll, but I see what you were going for.

[Dunngeon]

As BJC said, if something decreases your cycle time, it's in your best competitive interest to pursue it. Obviously, resources and other limiting metrics apply here. That said, I believe most successful robots will have some component on their intake that can be defined as active.