Our team is wondering how common picking up a frisbee will be this year. There are threads on how to pick up a frisbee, but have any teams made a fully functional lifter + hopper mechanism yet? If so, how fast do you think it’ll be, and how often do you think you’ll use it?
842 is having success in that area: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUEg4TCwSd8&list=UUwLQB4zKbzMKxzCS5-7qMxw&index=9
We’re also planning on a floor pickup using the same concept (lexan flap + roller intake). I’m not seeing successful floor pickups on more than 50-60% of robots this year, mostly due to a lack of interest in attempting it since the feeder slot is so convenient and the game pieces are so awkward. But I’ve been wrong before!
Another interesting question might be how many teams are attempting to pick up inverted discs and of those teams, which will fire them upside-down and which will include a mechanism to right them.
It seems to me that picking them up is the easy part. Manipulating them within the confines of the robot is much harder!
here is an example
-this is an interesting design, but can it hold more than 1 frisbee at a time?
Also, our robot should be able to pick up frisbees quite well, using both belts and pneumatics
It looks like they might be extending the hopper on the bottom out a bit more than the prototype shows. Which would allow you to shoot it and feed it by aiming the mechanism vertically. Imagine the Ri3D robot, except with the hopper on the bottom.
I could be wrong, but that seems reasonable.
Within the robot? Who told you you had to do that? 
Our current plan is to allow for the simple (err, “simple”) addition of floor loading during Unbag for second districts, but not worry about it until everything else is in order. That said, geometry is misbehaving a little…
picking up frisbees isn’t that hard. you just have a simple roller out infront of some polycarb and you can pick it up. Manipulating the frisbees to go into the shooter is a whole different story.
The geometry of this entire system and having it fit within that 54" cylinder has has given me sleepless nights and nightmares this season! We’re playing 3 ideas at the moment, and hopefully the prototypes can show us something that I’m not seeing about what we can do. We’ve already been under the assumption that having the intake integrated with the shooter would take the longest, but if this isn’t fleshed out by week 3, we’re going to be in trouble.
Nobody… I didn’t even say that’s what we’re doing! 
But weight considerations and the fact that frisbees go under bumpers quite easily makes it a strong consideration.
Geometry and the fact that Frisbees are just so… Frisbeeish.
Excluding internal disc manipulation:
Picking up 1 disc at a time: easily doable on any robot design
Picking up 2 discs side-by side: much harder due to constraints and lower room for error. But why would anyone want to do that?
Uberautonomousiosity?
What are you doing about upside down frisbees?
In auton the frisbees that are “free game” are line up side by side, why not pick up both at once? 7 frisbee auton in top goal = 42 points. Add in a 10 point climb and you just beat the teams that score 4 alliance disks in tower goal and climb high…and there is still teleop scoring to be had! Auton is key, like most years, and because of that, a frisbee pick-up mechanism should be strongly considered.
Was being facetious. Of course I knew that, as has been teased around these forums over the last few days. The amount of people who write sensationalist claims about not needing any floor pickup is ridiculous. Even a single-disc floor loader is very valuable in autonomous since it can get a total of 5 autonomous discs.
Robots without floor pickup will win events as captains or first round picks this year. I absolutely guarantee it.
Probably. There are 50-something events. I’ll bet you a team t-shirt that there are more alliance captains with floor pickup than without.
My guess is that at one of our regionals, we will probably see about half the alliance captains with floor pickup, and the other will have one or two.
Oh man, you read my mind. Floor pickup is going to be essential for those teams that go beyond just 3 disc autonomous. It’s going to be like a 6+ ball auton that we say last year.