Is there any way to make a mechanism that comes out of the perimeter and corrects the coral from sideways to straight or feeds it straight to a telescoping arm, from the floor**? Assuming a human player intentionally drops coral into the floor. If there is a better way, please feel free to suggest it.
Might be worthwhile taking a look at some of the robot mechanisms in 2015 that reoriented the totes.
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Given that there’s a grand total of 3 coral on your side of the field and coral can be fed in either orientation from the HP station, I’d ask if it’s necessary to reorient it?
A spindexer could accomplish this within the frame of the robot, a swerve drive robot can simply feed perpendicular to the arm.
Use the other drop method in the Chute. If you want it straight out, you can send it straight out.
Coral is very similar to this years FTC game piece. During our initial testing for our FTC mechanisms, we found it’s fairly easy to straighten an off-center piece using a simple wedge guide with a “slot” at the center and compliant intake roller. Based on the geometry of the Coral, we anticipate it may actually be easier to handle than the FTC game pieces were, as it should slide in a way that allows for easier alignment.
The main limitations for a Coral mechanism are the 18" extension limit, which reduces the possible effectiveness (depth) of a wedge, and the weight of putting such a mechanism on an end-effector (a pass-off intake might be preferable).
In any case, it should be fairly easy to prototype for this game piece, even a simple design using cardboard should tell you a lot.
Given the lack of a protected loading zone and the time it takes to align with a feeder station, our initial impressions are that ground pickup will be substantially faster, if done well. That said, new/lower-resource teams should probably focus on keeping things simple and feeding directly into the robot in a preferred orientation, rather than trying to re-orient Coral in the robot.
Yes
I present the most complicated mechanism I have ever been a part of putting on an FRC robot that somehow worked and made it to the field
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