What are good ways to pick up hatches off the ground? Are there methods without hook-and-loop tape or suction?
Check out 5172. They used it quite a bit at champs to make their hatch cycles even faster. 1325 also had a very effective floor hatch intake.
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The most notable ground pickup team I saw here in FMA was 225, whose entire robot seemingly was designed around this feature. I believe they cover it in their Behind The Bumpers piece on FUN as well.
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We used a spatula and scooped them up. Bonus was the mec stayed inside our frame parrimeter. https://youtu.be/HxJ3mA1bP4Q
We also used a fully inside frame perimeter ground pickup. Didn’t get used that much but it helped a couple of times when loading stations jammed.
Pretty much was a 2017 gear intake. I’ll see if I can get some pics, but here’s a Facebook video: https://www.facebook.com/copperheadrobotics/videos/2528964943845209/
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4935 had a very interesting floor pickup that they used a few times. It s pickup style was like 3244’s spatula except it picked up from the center of the hatch with a hook-shaped piece of polycarb. It was not extremely fast, but got the job done when they needed to pick up off the ground
2122 used green compliant wheels to engage the hatch panel with the spatula…https://www.thebluealliance.com/match/2019hop_qm20
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One of the local teams had an intake of rubber wheels on a horizontal shaft. The wheels went to floor level and pulled the hatch panel back onto a “spatula” of thin plastic which pushed into the carpet a bit deeper than the wheels. This whole unit then flipped up and presented the hatch panel at cargo ship/L1 level where there HP station intake got hold of it.
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Ramageddon Robotics #4336 used a row of compliant wheels and a scoop. Thanks to FRC#95 for the inspiration. Ground pickup @ 20sec.
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1712 prototyped a hatch pick-up this year, and it was even on the robot for our first handful of matches at Westtown. Ultimately integration issues caused its downfall more than the mechanism itself, but given the relatively low value of the ground pick-up, we didn’t invest in solving those integration issues.
Our design was a “spatula style” pick-up with roller wheels, inspired by 1619’s 2017 intake, and similar to a couple others already posted in this thread.
The prototype makes some guest appearances in our weekly build season videos on our YouTube channel:
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TL;DW - we used rollers with a thin bit of plastic to get under the hatch. It was effective and reasonably robust in competition.
Team 1073 had a green compliant wheel floor pickup similar to gear floor pickups in 2017. This mechanism also doubled as part of our climb. We originally intended to have a loading station and ground pickup for hatches but our original loading station mechanism didn’t work out too well and the floor pickup worked much better than expected so we decided to go with just the floor pickup for hatches.
It’s shown and lightly explained at 2:05 in our behind the bumpers video
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