Robots picking tubes up?

[Brandon Holley]

Here is a scenario that may come up often and could absolutely kill you if you cannot ground load:

You head over to your feeder and grab a tube, you start heading back to your scoring zone, and an opposing robot is waiting for you trying to keep you out of your zone. Due to some sort of collision, or interaction you end up dropping the tube a few feet outside of your scoring area. Now, you have to turn around and head back to your feeder just to go through the entire process again.

An even more realistic scenario:
You grab a tube from your feeder, head towards your scoring zone. Get your arm to the correct height and begin lining up to score on one of the pegs. Just as you release the tube, an inexperienced driver driving one of your alliance partners robot, bumps into you. The tube falls to the ground. Now you have to go all the way across the field to get another one.


In my opinion, there are way too many ways for a tube to end up on the ground, and there may even be strategic advantages to picking up off the ground, like having runner robots, etc. Ground pickup will be absolutely essential to the success of an effective tube placing robot.

Now if your strategy is aimed at something else, maybe you can sacrifice that part of the game, however if you are planning on scoring tubes, I would would plan on picking a tube up off the ground.

-Brando