Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?

[BJC]

I really don't think this is the sort of thing that can or should be voted upon.

Recycle Rush, like all FRC games have been in the modern era, is about how many points/second your team's robot / alliance can score. The more points you score, the more competitive you are.

The robot generally goes through a cycle in order to score. Something like:
1. Move to game piece(s).
2. Pick up game piece(s).
3. Move to scoring area.
4. Score game piece(s).
5. Repeat.

How quickly do can do a cycle determines how many cycles you do which determines how many points you can score.

So when you ask, "is an active intake necessary to be competitive" the answer isn't a yes or a no. An active intake is beneficial if it decreases your cycle time. If you are able to score more cycles than the teams you are competing against you will win.

Cheers, Bryan

[Chief Hedgehog]

Originally Posted by BJC

I really don't think this is the sort of thing that can or should be voted upon.

Recycle Rush, like all FRC games have been in the modern era, is about how many points/second your team's robot / alliance can score. The more points you score, the more competitive you are.

The robot generally goes through a cycle in order to score. Something like:
1. Move to game piece(s).
2. Pick up game piece(s).
3. Move to scoring area.
4. Score game piece(s).
5. Repeat.

How quickly do can do a cycle determines how many cycles you do which determines how many points you can score.

So when you ask, "is an active intake necessary to be competitive" the answer isn't a yes or a no. An active intake is beneficial if it decreases your cycle time. If you are able to score more cycles than the teams you are competing against you will win.

Cheers, Bryan

Very rightly stated. Intakes can be very powerful mechanisms if you are able to stack and score effectively and efficiently. However, if much time is consumed gathering totes on an intake - then you are losing time scoring.

Stacking needs to be the optimal goal. Then how you gather the tots is secondary. If you use forks or the Greenhorns design - a lot of stacking can be accomplished.

If you spend too much time creating an intake at the cost of your stacking mech - so will your gameplay suffer.

Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog

Stacking needs to be the optimal goal. Then how you gather the totes is secondary. If you use forks or the Greenhorns design - a lot of stacking can be accomplished.

You might wanna rethink your priorities. You can't stack what you don't have.

[rlowe61]

Originally Posted by BJC

Recycle Rush, like all FRC games have been in the modern era, is about how many points/second your team's robot / alliance can score. The more points you score, the more competitive you are.

The robot generally goes through a cycle in order to score. Something like:
1. Move to game piece(s).
2. Pick up game piece(s).
3. Move to scoring area.
4. Score game piece(s).
5. Repeat.

How quickly do can do a cycle determines how many cycles you do which determines how many points you can score.

Cheers, Bryan

I have to agree with Bryan. In every game you have the cycle (wash, Rinse, Repeat).
Now active is a vague term. You can have active, which allows for the robot to come to a game peice and the rollers will pull it in, and you can have an active system which assist the robot in manipulating the piece so the robot better aligned. I would think that being able to have rollers that can assist with turning totes a little, so the robot doesn't have to do fine moves, will be the biggest help. An active system that pulls in totes can be delayed if the robot has to do all the aligning first.
Good Luck and Have Fun

roger

[gurellia53]

I have wondered about active intakes for this year's game. I think there's a good comparison of Recycle Rush and Ultimate Ascent. In 2013, you could be extremely successful by being purely a human loaded robot - no floor pickup and no active intake necessary. This year is the same but with fewer game pieces available to the human player. Also, loading from the human player will be slower.

This means that each alliance will likely require at least one robot to play without interaction with the human player. This increases value of landfill robots and recycle container robots which will likely require active intake mechanisms.

Still, pure human loaded robots won't need an active intake if they interface directly with the tote chute.

[RonnieS]

Originally Posted by BJC

I really don't think this is the sort of thing that can or should be voted upon.

Recycle Rush, like all FRC games have been in the modern era, is about how many points/second your team's robot / alliance can score. The more points you score, the more competitive you are.

The robot generally goes through a cycle in order to score. Something like:
1. Move to game piece(s).
2. Pick up game piece(s).
3. Move to scoring area.
4. Score game piece(s).
5. Repeat.

How quickly do can do a cycle determines how many cycles you do which determines how many points you can score.

So when you ask, "is an active intake necessary to be competitive" the answer isn't a yes or a no. An active intake is beneficial if it decreases your cycle time. If you are able to score more cycles than the teams you are competing against you will win.

Cheers, Bryan

Going off of this, I agree. Just adding that your time it takes to acquire totes could end up being proportional to your success but that could be any mechanism, not just intakes to bring totes under robot control.

I will say that I have seen a fair amount of robots/mechanisms that are relying on alignment of fingers in the totes...this could be trouble if your main objective was to be a open field stacker; in another role it might work a lot better. It shouldn't be an open vote but something your team went over in the first couple weeks of season and could be added later. DO NOT see it as, "Dang we missed a huge part of the game, lets scrap part of our design week 4 and make a new one using intakes...not worth it especially if it compromises everything you have already planned.
-Ronnie

[MrJohnston]

We first decided what our primary function would be. We then decided how fast we thought we'd need to be able to accomplish that primary function in order to be a top robot.

Our goal was to be able gather and stack 5/6 totes and one recycling container (all off the ground) and stack them in under 30 seconds. Recognizing that some of that time would be used simply driving the robot from spot-to-spot, we knew we needed an "aggressive" intake system and lifter. So, we told our engineering team that we needed the acquiring and lifting mechanisms to accomplish the following in about one second:
* Grab totes and bins (even if not perfectly lined-up)
* Bring them in to the stack (we have an internal-bottom stacker).
* Lift the item just over 12 inches, to prepare for the next tote.

We found several ways to accomplish this, but they all had one commonality: They had some sort of active "grabbing" mechanism on the intake. Every possibility that we studied that did not have such a mechanism was not going to be able to gain control of the totes fast enough to satisfy our speed goals.
Could it be done? I dunno. We are always looking for super-simple ways to accomplish things. We just didn't find it this time.

No, the robot is not finished yet, so we really don't know if we have accomplished the goals... However, so far it is on track to do so. Hopefully we'll know by next weekend.....