Varying conditions of the balls

[Grim Tuesday]

So, in our shooter testing and calibration, we discovered that each ball has a different amount of squishyness. Somewhat hard to describe, but to say the effects, the ball we were using for testing went into the basket, and the brand new virgin one hit the ceiling. About 5 feet off. Our conclusion was that balls, throughout the competition will degrade in firmness, but each may degrade in a different way. This makes calibrating a shooter much more difficult. This could and very likely will be a major issue at competitions, when teams tear up balls and new ones are thrown onto the field.

How are you guys, besides the catapult/dumper teams, planning on dealing with this issue? We were prototyping a mechanism that would squish the balls against the side of the robot and detect force, but it was never finished. Has anyone had any luck detecting this decidedly qualitative factor?