Hi everyone, I’m wondering what everyone’s opinions on intaking position are. Do you think picking up directly from the source is important / has significant benefits over just ground intaking?
The dominant intake this year is going to be the ground intake, of whatever form. Given that the source will drop notes into position to be collected by ground intakes faster than lining up to get them directly from the source, there’s no advantage to having an intake that can do that. Add to that the need to pick up the pre-positioned notes and any others that end up on the field (since numbers are limited and notes are not recycled) either accidentally or deliberately, and you have a clear advantage for the ground intake.
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The added challenge this year is bumpers must be full all around. Your ground intake would need to either be over or under the bumpers, unlike past years where you could go with a cutout.
Assuming that your intake is effective, you can potentially cut down on cycle time (see 2017 gear cycler bots)
At mid to high levels of play, it would be necessary.
When your intake can pick up from the ground very well, why even care about lining up at the source? Just have your human drop the note before the robot arrives.
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The real question will be an over the bumper or under the body intake, under the body is undoubtedly more protected from other robots however I for see challenges with lining up correctly to intake the note and not get it stuck in your wheels. That being said (I’m not saying this is what we are doing but) a hybrid intake that can intake from both the ground and human player station directly could be cool.
With how small the protected zones are I’m not sure if this is fully true. I suspect intaking direct from feeder will be decently faster in the real game
I expect the exact opposite to be the case. Aligning to the station means you need to drive up, stop, wait for the ring to fall down, and then go. Intaking from the ground just means you barely need to touch the ring and then its yours. Because you only are intaking one thing, there’s no indexer funniness that would cause station intake to be preferred like it was in 2020/2017.
Additionally, playing defense at the loading station is not the move. Swerve is really good at getting around defense, even if the defender is a swerve due to a reaction time advantage and it doesn’t take much to get into the protected zone.
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How big is this difference, really? In the thread about the WCP Competitive Concept, RC said the following:
And indeed, it does seem to human load pretty fast: https://youtu.be/TKs_UDj4Ej0?si=1YpRAZsns3NDBCCD&t=29
Do you have an example of a ground pickup cycle quicker than this, or are those pickups still in development at this point in the season?
I don’t think it’s a massive deal breaker type thing, but picking up from the floor was faster than doing the ‘baby bird’ at the single station last season.
Last year you could get the game pieces to go very far 
#cuberobots
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Totally. I was actually just referring to cones.
Here some of the data I collected after like week 2 last year.
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With skipping a ground intake, you are much less competitive in auto because you can only score one game piece.
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In terms of raw scoring sure, but remember you only care about having a higher score than your opponent, so stopping an opponent’s auto by virtue of being in the way contributes to your alliance as well.
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That is true, it depends mostly on what your team’s strategy for auto is. Personally, I prefer getting scores in the speaker for 5pts a piece but defending is always a valid strategy.
Agreed but the original poster was asking about whether having human loading capability is worth it in addition to having ground pickup.
I was trying to illustrate that human loading can be relatively fast, so it could be worth going for if your ground pickup works for auto but is still slow. There are many reasons this could be the case, the most basic ones being that you decided to go simple with your ground pickup, or that you haven’t mastered picking up things with the sight line being all the way across the field.
I’d have to guess that most successful simple tank drive bots built off the kit chassis this year will have both ground pickup and human loading. Ground pickup for the auto points and for picking up the notes that start on the field, plus human loading because it’s just hard to line up to notes all the way across the field with a tank drive bot.
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So will the 1323 robot be only top load? 
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In my mind the first 15 seconds of the match determine everything (being autos) during which every note is worth 5 points. So having a four note auto (something relatively common) will start you off with 22 points. (Including leaving parking zone). This is huge and only possible with a ground bumper intake. I think a non ground bumper intake will be viable at many week one events, but as we get further into the season it becomes less and less viable. Of course I am speaking from a higher level Minnesota team, however I think ground pickup is extremely important.
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