ok Its not unreliable rather inaccurate
There are 6 on each side of the player station unless they are used for preloading on robots. So there are up to 12 available. The most we used in a single match was 9, but still, moving 9 cargo in a single match with something this simple is mind boggling.
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I bet your students learned a lot and WILL be more willing to help next year. 
Personally, i think the earlier you get students to do things themselves and put it on the robot, they get more motivated in the long-term.
I’ve participated in FRC long enough to know that gravity only works in ways you don’t want it to, and never seems to work when you try to incorporate it into your design.
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A rookie team made it all the way to lead the #2 alliance to finals at NC Wake this year, using a bucket mechanism that was literally a metal bucket from the hardware store. It was highly effective and very difficult to dislodge once the cargo was in it. Maybe as a rookie team they didn’t know the accepted wisdom about such things and let what worked be their guide instead.
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The bucket/chute is a great design for teams who don’t have the resources to make an effective roller based Cargo mechanism. It obviously doesn’t have the same high end potential as active mechanisms, but as proved in 2017, sometimes you can not only get away with a passive mechanism, but you can excel with it. I’ve seen many robots this season with unreliable roller based systems, which would have been much better off with something simpler and similar to a bucket. It’s not the right choice for every team, but it’s certain the right choice for some teams.
Simple is not a bad thing, despite what many people will tell you.
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Not gravity per se, but there’s no guarantee as to what direction gravity will be pushing with respect to your robot.
I did see a few of these last week.
- 5965 had a plastic bucket that didn’t hold the cargo firmly enough; they had some trouble getting them loaded, and even more trouble holding onto them in collisions.
- 6103 had an awesome looking metal (stainless?) bucket that looked like a custom-welded stock pot and did somewhat better. It also could only receive cargo from the loading station.
Another issue with buckets is that they are more sensitive to variation in CARGO inflation than are wheeled intakes and claws.
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Team 7486 did it because we were short on funds and low on time. We were able to end up as the 8th seed after Quals and the #5 Alliance by focusing on cargo (We could do both) even though we had no driver practice until our first Qualifier match.
I like the simplicity and effectiveness of the cargo baskets.
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2521 has a polycarb bucket, and we love it. It’s super simple (one pneumatic piston) and integrates really nicely with our cargo pass-through and hatch claw. It’s also really, really light (bucket + hatch claw are all <5lbs).
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maybe you have that backwards? Our basket will catch and release any Cargo that you can get through the loading chute.
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just because their strategy didn’t involve floor pickup doesn’t mean it’s worse for them. You could still have a rolley grabber for the chute. Whether they had floor pickup or not is kind of out of scope.
Not having floor pickup is a limitation, but hey…we did rank #5 at our first regional, and #2 at our second (and were Finalists). So it seems we figured out how to play the game reasonably well, without floor pickup.
There are a lot of robots with floor Cargo pickup, that did a lot worse!
(one way to get around the limitation is to pick an alliance partner with floor pickup. Another is to be careful about not letting Cargo go all over the place)
4328 built a bucket on top of their chassis in 6 hours at the El Paso event. They were a decent cargo-bot at Channelview, ranking 12th overall.
I rest my case.
Based on how much the robots in three days did it they allowed for more teams to survey more options.
So…you are worried about overinflated cargo, not fitting through the loading chute?
I think that was a Week 1 problem. We never had any issues.
Plus as my team found out wheels are amazing
gotta have those rolly-grabbers
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The funny thing is, we have have the resources to build a roller based Cargo mechanism. Well…mostly. We didn’t buy a bunch of gear boxes, pulleys, belts, rolly wheels, etc before build season, and by the time we figured out what we might need, they were mostly out of stock.
We ended up with a relatively simple Cargo mechanism that is mounted on an elevator (our first elevator, and a struggle to design and build). The basket only has one moving part, pneumatically actuated. Some aspects of it are worse than active roller cargo mechanisms, but other aspects are better.
It’s interesting how everyone just knows that it can’t work. And watching video of it working well, won’t convince people that it can work.
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Yup
We would rather be able to swoop in from the sides of a ball for a wider range than have to line up a box perfect to grab floor cargo. I suppose it could work better for the human player station, but grabbing stray cargo can really improve time usage.