Should You Get Totes From Landfill

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by Caleb Sykes

How fast do you think a well-trained HP can get the totes into play? Ours can get under 5 seconds without any serious practice, and I expect he will be down in the 3 second range in the near future once our robot gets more together. As for fouls, trained human players could generally go the whole season last year without getting a foul, and since there were 10x more silly ways to get a foul last year than this year, I expect that our HP will be foul-less this season.

There are a couple of good reasons to choose landfill over HP station, but I don't think that speed is a good one at all. Only a handful of very good teams will be able to collect totes from the floor and add them to stacks in under 3 seconds. Most teams that go for ground pick-up will take around 10 seconds to line up with a tote even if it is out in the open, and grabbing from the landfill will at least double that.

I strongly disagree. I think that having totes that are largely restrained from movement, in a known orientation, with a back-stop on at least two sides, will be much easier to pick up that a lose tote at an arbitrary orientation on the field. It all depends on how the pick-up mechanism is designed.