Shooter vs Dumper Trade Study

[Goldeye]

Originally Posted by Bongle

If your shooter has a moderate speed (8ft/s), then a robot just 10ft away could accelerate hard enough to be 1.5ft away from where you expected it to be (if you assume constant velocity). If you add in the inevitable imprecision of an orbit-ball shooter, the amount of balls you'd get in would be low.

A powered dumper seems to be the way to go.

By similar arguments, a moving robot further than 1-2 feet away will, at the least, be a challenge to reach and dump into, particularly for long enough to dump all the stored orbit balls. I don't know the radius of the goal offhand. Isn't the radius about 1.5ft? If the error due to acceleration is just that, then the only real concern is the precision of a shooter. I can't comment on that

Also, 10 feet really isn't that close. Robots can easily get within 5 feet of eachother, I just envision trouble getting closer (and staying there)

There's no right answer, and teams will get both ways working, but I feel confident saying this just from the nature of this year's driving: if you can build a device that aims independently of your robot and propels the balls (at least slightly), you will have a much easier time getting balls in the goal. There are still other tradeoffs, of course.