What Shooter Design was Most Consistent

[mikegrundvig]

Sadly, our first competition of the year went very badly. Our vision system is accurately telling us the distance to the target in matches (+- a few inches most of the time) and we were able to control the RPM of our shooter very accurately as best we can tell. The PID loops appeared very reliable once tuned. Sadly, every shot was hugely variable so we were never able to really dial in the shooter itself. We have removed the entire shooter and hope to redo it before the next regional.

Our shooter has four 8" wheels, two on top, two on bottom. Each is run by a 550 motor to a max of about 2200 RPM. Honestly, far more shooting power than is practical. We had azimuth (horizontal rotation) as well as elevation (shot angle) in the system but we ended up pinning the elevation at around 60 degrees and just varied the RPM because we had mechanical issues with the elevation motors. Due to our rather obnoxious drive system that can't be easily changed we are going to have to retain the azimuth control to a limited degree as I doubt the robot can spin in place effectively

I believe our inconsistency came from our shooter having mechanical problems - feeding variability, lots of flex in the design, it had some bends in it due to crashes, far too much compression, etc. What I'd like to know is what other shooter designs were people using that are consistently accurate while still being simple enough for reliability.

At our regional the best teams appeared to be using a "hooded shooter" with two wheels on a single axle and limited compression. I'd love to see other solidly reliable ideas too.

As of right now, I think our best bet is a new shooter we can dial in to take advantage of our consistently good vision data.

Thanks!

-Mike