My team is torn as to whether or not we want our intake to open and close with pneumatics so that we do not need to be ultra precise, or to keep the complexity down and use a passive opening and closing system. With the cargo being able to roll this year, opening would be nice, but so would not have 8 tanks on our bot. What is your team thinking about?
Would you already be using peumatics on your robot for other stuff?
If you have the space pneumatic intake will be more reliable and in most cases efficient.
I’d highly suggest taking a look at ball intakes from previous robots. FIRST robots have had ball intakes for over 20 years and there are a ton of proven solutions. A number of them do require pneumatics to deploy outside the frame perimeter, but some of them don’t.
If you’re only using the pneumatics for intakes, you can probably get away with one or two tanks. Realistically, you’re probably not deploying/retracting the intake more than 10 times per match.
Edit: just for deploying the intake and shifting, you probably don’t need more than 3 tanks.
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Yes. We will be using dog shifters
at least for our cargo mechanism, it deploys with pneumatics and the rest of it is rollers/motors. our hatch mechanism only needs pneumatics to place, so we can get hatches from the human player station passively, but it needs a piston to deploy horizontal. but it totally depends on what your other systems are. if you have a shifting gearbox, you likely need pneumatics anyway, so it shouldn’t be that hard to add.
another thing about pneumatics (and this is straight from the 1678 strategic design seminars) is that they are binary. great for two positions, constant force, and minimal programming (just a boolean value). depending on how you are planning on using them, they can be awesome, or they can be terrible. just my 2¢
Our powerup intake accepts cargo like a dream. (Its a modified Greyt Claw) We may just redesign that to articulate up and down with a motor, and add pneumatics to open and close.
In that case I would look into making some simple prototypes of both and attaching them to an old robot. You may find that you do not need the pneumatic actuation.
Unfortunately this is our second year and our intake for last year is welded to our carriage because we did not know any better :(. I will however try to design the intake such that we can quickly swap pneumatics for 15lb gas springs to test what works better.