Feeding: The Real Bottleneck

Long time lurker, first time poster :cool:

Lots of people claiming, especially in a recent poll here of shooting 6-10 balls per second (bps) (or more!) with an accuracy of 70-100%. This is great, and if these teams achieve this then they should be proud!

However, being a little more halfway through build season, I can’t imagine many teams have a competition/robot ready feed and intake system complete to pair with their shooter prototypes.

How many of these claims of these shooters are being optimally feed through a perfect gravity fed chute with a line of balls ready to go into their shooter?

Making a shooter which will shoot the balls at this rate has proven to be not overwhelmingly difficult, but do you have all the details worked out to FEED a steady 8-10bps to your shooter? This seems like it could be the bigger challenge :wink:

I think that the bigger problem is not finding a mechanism to feed fuel rapidly and consistently; it’s making it all fit in the robot along with a hopper, intake, shooter, etc.

Agreed. Getting all systems working together (retrieval, feed, and shooting) is a challenge. At this point in the season, it appears that the responses to polls about speed and accuracy are likely more “aspirations” than reality. If teams have already accomplished what they’re stating, that’s great. Week 1 events are right around the corner.

This is exactly it. Going from a separate intake prototype, separate feeder prototype, and separate shooter prototype to a whole, functioning system will be a bit of a reality check for many teams. We’ve encountered this challenge in the past and since then have tried to be diligent about combining our prototypes to get an idea of how the whole system will function.

Agreed, the challenge is real for sure. But Teams will find solutions to this problem if it matters to them.