Moveable arm for Infinite Recharge-any thoughts?

[myrrhkhan]

I was wondering if any team had a moveable robot arm for Infinite Recharge this year, like our team’s bot last year, as seen below:

At kickoff, one of the ideas our group presented to our team was to have an intake connected to a robot arm that could be manually adjusted, or possibly be automatically adjusted using some vision programming. This would’ve guaranteed accuracy when shooting high.
We eventually chose to shoot low for our strategy for the sake of time and simplicity, and I’m very proud of our intake/outtake system.
However, just for the heck of it, I’ve come to gather some thoughts from the Chief Delphi community and see if anyone had any such arm. How did it work? Is it efficient? Did you have a good cycle time? This is certainly something I’d like to experiment with in offseason, since most teams I’ve seen have a pretty static outtake when shooting high. Just some food for thought.

P.S. Congrats to team 1895 for their very first win and their very first blue ribbon in 15 years, in addition to their AWESOME intake/outtake system! I (and many others on my team) always regarded them as a little brother since we mentor them and one of our mentors graduated from that team.

[NatsirtD]

Team 492 used it and competed at Glacier Peak last weekend. Here’s a match video for reference.

[myrrhkhan]

Wow! Thanks for sharing that! It seems to have worked quite well considering they made a lot of shots. Not sure if they had some sort of automatic alignment, but it must’ve worked quite well with the gunner. I also realized that it might work well when a team decides to shoot both high and low.
One disadvantage I realized is that the since the arm is not fixed, it would be hard to keep the bot at a specific “sweet spot” unless the drivers had tons of practice. I guess the decision is between choosing whether to have a guaranteed sweet spot in the robot’s position or a sweet spot in the shooter’s position. I guess it all depends on the drivers and how capable the bot is.

[NatsirtD]

The arm could be automated, similar to how our hood works. The flywheel speed can be adjusted along with the the angle to get the perfect shot every time. With motors actuating the arm, it can be held in the same spot or auto align.