Intaking from the source: Top or bottom?

The feeding station this year is a bit similar to last years as you can collect notes from a top position or from the floor, which will your team opt for? Im curious to hear any reasoning for your choices

  • Bottom
  • Top
  • Both
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For this loading from the top will definitely be easier than picking notes from the top.

Even while taking into account the time it’ll take to line up and everything to recieve from the top?

Yes, some of the reasoning comes from a building perspective, it’s definitely a lot easier and less time consuming to build a top loader than a ground intake. While there are still some downsides as a team it is important to use your time wisely.

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Lining up to receive from the top can be fixed by using the april tags. Also just bumping up against the source straightens out your bot. When the note falls on the ground, where it lands is completely random meaning it’s entirely up to the driver to collect it unless you want to go with object detection which is much more complex than just bumping against the source.

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Couldn’t you account for this just by having a really wide roller intake? I’m thinking back at rapid react but the touch it own it aspect of wide intakes minimized a lot of otherwise present driver liabilities

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Sure you could but that just makes the driver’s job easier. If the driver misses once, a bot with a top intake would already be scoring by the time the other bot actually picks up the game piece.

Why Ground Intake is better (probably):
I see a directly from the source intake as unless your team has limitations such as budget, resources, programming, etc the clear option is from the floor. If your team has these limitations from the source is really simply done as seen with the kitbot. With a touch it, own it ground intake that is wide, intaking will be nearly instant from the ground. If you have a floor intake it kind of removes the need of the directly from the source intake as just dropping the pieces on the floor is likely just as fast if not faster than directly from the source. With the pieces in the middle that may be left over after auto your first cycles could be shorter if you can pick up off the ground which not only gets you faster initial cycles but also denies the opposing alliance from getting faster cycles. On top of this a greater than 1 piece auto is dependent on having a ground intake. With the large amount of points you could potentially score in auto which would heavily influence the outcome of the game you need a ground intake, or assuming the 3 pieces next to your speaker aren’t all shot in auto also after auto, so conveniently all of this this also points to a floor intake.

How I would approach it:
I would prioritize in order what I’d ideally see on my teams robot
Need to have for an intake:
Driver Friendly (Likely pretty wide, touch it own it)
Pickup from the Ground
Nice to have: direct from the source intaking

If you can intake from the source it doesn’t hurt to have, but other things are more important so focus on the source intake if it happens to be convenient to implement into design. But I’d doubt it would be used much (especially since its better for drivers to stick to and practice one specific task), so I’d only do this if it was a small easy task that could be used to help teach students with less hands experience with programming learn, or as just a tiny very short side project that I’d only make no longer than 15-maybe 30 minutes. If it is turned into a learning process and your team is in a comfortable place you could consider budgeting more time for this.

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I agree with your reasoning for ground intaking, dropped pieces this year also seem very valuable. Im curious tho as how your team plans to index the note after intaking it? We’ve been debating over having the intake feed the note to the shooter after retracting or having some sort of intermediary system of belts/rollers that funnel the note to the shooter

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At the moment I have top as we are starting with the Kitbot. Could change to both if we make a ground intake for it.

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This is a long conversation and our team is still in the stage of preliminary CAD to look at possible variations of designs (we are doing CAD for robot concepts) and seeing what things we like about each before we finalize a design for this upcoming weekend for brief prototyping where needed primarily with things that directly interact with game pieces being intake and shooter this year. Mainly we are going for a 2022 style system in general. Where we have an intake feed into a shooter, we are avoiding a hopper or having to flip/ retract the intake to have a game piece fed into the shooter for simplicity/efficiency. The current discussion really is under the robot intake or past the bumper. There are tradeoffs for both and we’ll probably discuss our decision process on our OA build thread. I personally to your team’s debate prefer an intake that doesn’t feed into the shooter after retracting primarily for auto. In tele-op if you could do that transfer while traversing the field and it still could be pretty efficient in auto it would just require snappy pretty good programming. So I think if done well with proper CAD to ensure proper integration of components either could work, me personally due to the slight advantage of not having to move the intake in auto or worry about a transfers that requires more than wheels/belts turning prefer a stationary intake systems into the shooter ideally without for simplicity but if needed with a hopper. If it needs a hopper between the shooter and intake I would consider a handoff more.

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The kitbot is a really great starting point to be able to perform most game tasks with some modifications. For one, if affordable to your team an off the shelf climber in a box preferably two can give you an endgame climb. There are other options I could elaborate on if that doesn’t meet your teams budget or you’d like to try something else. Also the awesome work Robonauts do for the everybot could likely give you a simpler, cheaper climb design as well. The trap is likely not possible for a kitbot or it would have to be modified to the point beyond really being a kitbot anymore. For amp scoring there are a few example on here as to how to modify the kitbot to amp, if you want me to link examples I can. The ground intake will probably be the hardest addition to your robot. Your ground intake would probably require a lot of modification. If your team is up for that I could make some 2d sketches on CAD to give you guys some ideas, but it is fairly hard. Unless your team has been and wants to be really competitive, my opinion is keep just from the source intake and focus on fewer things but master them. Like be a master of a few not a jack of all traits kind of thing. Overall, your team needs to assess its resources, time and goals to decide if you want to be tasked with making a fairly complex to integrate ground intake. Maybe it is easier than I think with the kitbot, to me it doesn’t seem that way. Hopefully a really simple idea comes about.

Could you link those examples? I haven’t really seen any yet, besides Cranberry Alarm being able to semi consistently score in the amp with their intake. But that’s not really a kitbot.

So an adaptation of cranberry alarms churro on the kitbot could work, I could draw something if you don’t know what I’m referencing.

Steel City Robotics Alliance did something cool here:https://youtube.com/shorts/4XAbkWHUNig?si=84BlllUXk18G0KpK
It just falls in.

I think shooting it in with cranberry alarms method could hypothetically be faster.

There is also the option of taking the shooter that is attached to the main structure of the everybot, making the peak of the structure taller (this would be needed more for speed it could work if you didn’t hypothetically), and then putting the shooter on a pivot and shooting notes down into the amp. I would be sure to have a programming based and physical hardstop so that you wouldn’t go over the height limit with this. This option is also one of the few ways you could do the trap with the kitbot although you would need even more modifications for that and I think the trap isn’t for most teams.

I’d say for proven concept Steel Cities is best.
Assuming it could work stationary on the kitbot I’d say cranberry alarms churro would be most effective considering its simplicity.
I’d say the highest skill ceiling is the pivot, but I’d refrain from doing it if the churro can work, or for some other reasoning that comes about in the future.
This is beyond top and bottom though, my bad for expanding the topic, if a new thread is around or could be made about kitbot mods we could talk more there or some other way.

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I suppose with the pivot you could attempt to implement a climb and make it a 2:1, if thats appealing to anyone I could try and explain that in a different thread more. So its all in one so you add the complexity of the pivot, but remove the need for a separate climber.

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