In the past I had seen intake designs like:
These intakes could grab the ball from any direction even coming from the side of the robot. Similar designs were seen for Deep space like 930. I didn’t see many if any of these designs last year and no other ones this year.
Is the main limiting factor against these designs complexity? Are there other reasons a team might want to think twice about this?
Vectored intake wheels go brrrrr
Last time I saw these was around 2016, but even then mecanums had started taking over.
This is also often not true. Can’t find the video I’m thinking of for the life of me, but sticking one of these on the side of a robot driving forward at any significant speed is just a mess. It can work, but it’s not consistent by its own nature.
These were called “beaver tails” back in 2016. They have some other names as well.
They are very heavy and take a lot of polycord, so they’re kind of a pain to work with. Recent years have seen a huge boost in popularity for mecanum intakes or simple roller intakes that go over-the-bumper and index within the robot to make intaking faster, eliminating a lot of the use that beaver tails once saw.
They definitely have made appearances in recent years, however, just fewer than in years past.
Can vectored intake wheels actually intake from the side? I haven’t seen that working. I know they can center the ball.
CD7
That seems like a pretty niche use case. Usually people drive into the balls instead of pivoting into them. You might gain 2" or so of effective intake width using a beaver tail over a mecanum or simple roller intake.
I believe these are sometimes referred to as “Delphi” intakes for their earliest successful implementation by team Delphi from your picture. I would imagine the additional complexity from running the tube-like material that does the intaking makes it not as popular (its not as straightforward as throwing wheels on a shaft, the tubes need to be sized well and fit tightly on the drums they run on). Some teams may just feel the ability to grab from the side isn’t worth the extra hassle.
Having used this type of intake for Infinite recharge the biggest challenge is how long it takes to manufacture and assemble. You lose a lot of testing time that you need because of the added complexity.
I was the fabrication lead for 930 during the 2019 season so I can give you a bit of our experience with it.
First of all, I’ll give you a little bit more information on how it’s actually constructed. The entire mechanism runs off of a single motor (we used a 775 pro with a 12T to 60T GT2 belt reduction) and transmits the power to each of the rollers using these nylon bevel gears from McMaster Carr they are kind of pricey, and you have to broach them to 1/2" hex (we did it using a tailstock on a lathe). In 2020-2021 I know 930 tried 3D printing them (PETG) instead but they ended up not being strong enough. These bevel gear sets transmit the force to the other shafts perpendicular to them, and we ended up putting these bevel gear sets at every corner for redundancy (so 8 gears in total).
You can see closely in our FUN interview, or you can take a closer look at it in our CAD release from 2019.
Overall this intake held up very well despite being dragged up the rocket ship a few times, and otherwise being run into things, but at IRI after losing all pneumatic pressure and taking a few pretty good hits since it was always out in front of the robot, these gears were not too healthy and we ended up swapping out the entire mechanism before our next match. So the nylon gears take a good amount of abuse–until a point.
I think a big reason you didn’t see a design like this for the past two years, is that at least the style of intake that we used in 2019 really is optimized for grabbing one ball at a time from any direction. In a year that you need to pick up a high volume of balls like 2020-2021–a full-width intake that can grab more than one ball is going to work much better. In Rapid React, I could see either system being possible, but unless you find that vector wheels are not centering the cargo as much as you need, or you think that being able to pivot your robot into the cargo as we did in 2019 will be an important feature, just keep in mind it’s going to be more complex to replicate something along the lines of what we used than just putting vectored intake wheels on the intake axles.
Keep in mind if you make your plate small enough that the cargo can contact it from the side, you may still be able to get something similar with a vectored intake wheel system–but just be careful to make sure that the axle on the end can still take some abuse.
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