Maximum tote feed speed for HP

[Team3844]

We have not been able to break the 4.5 sec mark per tote. It typically takes our HP 30 seconds to feed a stack of 6.

Is anyone getting faster speeds than this? If so how?

We have a Feeding station built to the specs we got at kickoff. The HP says it is pretty substandard compared to the field feeder station.

[maxxman]

To increase their speeds speeds team 1114 2056 and 3683 in Ontario have built long ramps that can hold around 4 or 5 totes. This allows for their robots to load faster than their human player.

Take a look at all 3 in this video:
http://watchfirstnow.com/archives/122871071

[Spoam]

We use two human players. We stack 3 totes upside down next to the chute and have one person put totes on that stack while our HP slides them into the chute. The person that puts the totes on top stands outside the HP zone. You can feed 6 in way under 30 seconds like this.

[nuclearnerd]

We're hoping to get a little faster with one more practice day, but even using the "table" method described above, we're topping out at about 4-5s per tote. That's just enough to make 3 full stacks if you're fast at collecting the cans and placing the stacks, but it's a bottleneck for sure.

[VeqIR]

We encountered the same question after our first district and spent a lot of time analyzing how we were spending time for each stack. After our first district, we found we were taking a lot of time adding the noodle to our stack, aligning to the chute and intaking totes.

To fix alignment time, we added sensors to allow us to hit a button to automatically align to the tote chute (saved ~8s/stack). To improve noodling time, we moved from using the chute to going over the wall (saved ~6s/stack). To improve tote intake time, we tuned our intake system so that the tote always stops at the same spot before being added to the stacker (~10s/stack). It should be noted that our robot has a built-in ramp.

At this point, we are looking at around 3s/tote and ~35-40s per stack when we are actively loading from the HP (without using the 254/1114-style ramp).

If you have video of your competitions, I recommend timing each element of your stacking and find out what actions take the most amount of time. Once you have that info, you can more accurately target optimizations for your stacking time. You may find out that 4-5s/tote is completely tolerable if you optimize another element of your stacking (aligning, noodling, outputting).

Best of luck to you!

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by VeqIR

We encountered the same question after our first district and spent a lot of time analyzing how we were spending time for each stack. After our first district, we found we were taking a lot of time adding the noodle to our stack, aligning to the chute and intaking totes.

To fix alignment time, we added sensors to allow us to hit a button to automatically align to the tote chute (saved ~8s/stack). To improve noodling time, we moved from using the chute to going over the wall (saved ~6s/stack). To improve tote intake time, we tuned our intake system so that the tote always stops at the same spot before being added to the stacker (~10s/stack). It should be noted that our robot has a built-in ramp.

At this point, we are looking at around 3s/tote and ~35-40s per stack when we are actively loading from the HP (without using the 254/1114-style ramp).

If you have video of your competitions, I recommend timing each element of your stacking and find out what actions take the most amount of time. Once you have that info, you can more accurately target optimizations for your stacking time. You may find out that 4-5s/tote is completely tolerable if you optimize another element of your stacking (aligning, noodling, outputting).

Best of luck to you!

This is all great advice.

We started the season by guessing/prototyping how long various actions would take and building a model of how we thought the scoring would work. Of course, some of our assumptions turned out to be incorrect, and the robot as built at our first competition was not quite finished in a few areas.

After our first competition at CVR, we had video of each of our matches. We went through and analyzed precisely how long different actions took (replacing our estimated numbers), compared them to the "best of breed" in FRC (1114, 118, 987, 148, etc.), made adjustments where we found room for improvement, and were able to just about double our scoring output by SVR.

Let that be a lesson. A video camera is not very expensive. Any team should take video of their own matches and go through the exercise of identifying optimizations. There is typically a lot of "low hanging fruit" that requires no or minimal mechanical changes. This exercise can literally double how effective your robot is, no matter whether you are a rookie or a longtime vet.

[MooreteP]

6 totes in 20 seconds
Every time in this match for 3 6-stacks capped.
They ran out of Alliance station totes.

[Abhishek R]

It takes us right under 20 seconds to load 6 totes. Our scoring, when things go according to plan, is limited by the HP speed. We find it helpful to have 2 HPs load the totes.

[Clayton Summerall]

We've had the issue that when building our first stack it takes a while 20 to 25 seconds. Our second stack seems to go up a bit faster.

http://youtu.be/xz7wfz3v6cU

[Gweiss96]

For some teams, it is as fast as the human can load the totes. For example, Team 2122 Team Tators do this. Because they only use one driver, they use two human players. They make conveyor belt-like structure out of upside down totes behind the HP station and the first human player inserts the totes and opens the door, as well as noodles, while the other human player slides them to the first. The only time they stop loading is when the robot goes to stack. They end up making 3 stacks of 6 with containers and noodles.
It is super cool to watch. Here is a video, but it has subpar quality.

[Pretzel]

Originally Posted by Team3844

We have not been able to break the 4.5 sec mark per tote. It typically takes our HP 30 seconds to feed a stack of 6.

Is anyone getting faster speeds than this? If so how?

We have a Feeding station built to the specs we got at kickoff. The HP says it is pretty substandard compared to the field feeder station.

Since your question seems to be about the human player, I'll answer as to what our human players do.

The biggest piece is preparation. During autonomous, our human player slides three upside-down totes into the human player zone while the driver slides an additional six totes from the other side of the field over to the human player. We then have the third human player on the team place totes, right side up, on the upside-down totes for our human player to slide into the tote chute. This way the human player doesn't have to place the tote into the chute so much as slide it straight off the little platform of upside-down totes and into the chute. In doing this our human players can load a full stack of six onto the field in about 16-18 seconds, or just slightly faster than our robot can stack them.

Since our stacking is fully automated, I (as the driver) have helped our human player by placing the totes for them on their platform without the need for a human player from a different team if that human player was good at throwing noodles. I can also throw noodles during the stacking time if no human player is available or comfortable with throwing them.

[george.tan]

We timed our HP's ability to load totes, it takes about 20s for 6 totes. The robot stack speed is what usually limits the time.