Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?

[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.