Are active intakes necessary to be competitive in Recycle Rush?

[IronicDeadBird]

The question shouldn't be does it decrease cycle more so then another mechanism would.

[RunawayEngineer]

I think a lot of people are defining "competitive" as being among the top teams.
I think that being "competitive" means being on a level that you can contribute to a Playoff Alliance significantly - a la Minimum Competitive Concept.
Note that a particular design can be inferior, but the robot as a whole can still be competitive.
So I don't think that this poll will be productive with different definitions floating around.

[Jared Russell]

I can think of many ways that a robot without an active intake could be a valuable contributor to an Einstein alliance.

[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.....