The Best Intake?

FIRST General Forum
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Choice of a mechanism for intaking game pieces, (assuming you want to be able to intake both cones and cubes) is at the base of the design of the robot, question is, what’s best?

To discuss the obvious, as one option there’s the gripper types (with some resemblance of some popular intakes from 2018).
As you can see with these RI3D teams:

and there’s more just like it…

But, will a gripper be the best intake method for this season? And, will the best intake of the season just be whichever gripper is best at being a gripper?
Could be, but I doubt it.

The reason I don’t think the best intake will be a gripper is that, elite teams will require their intake designs to be touch & go design. Meaning they would want to mindlessly run over the piece and pick it up no matter what piece it is or how it’s positioned. And, because you can have tipped over, sideway cones, you probably can’t get that from a gripper.

That’s why I believe most elite teams will choose some sort of “over the bumper” intake for cones and cubes similar to most cargo intakes seen in Rapid React.
Maybe something like what’s shown here:

An alarming observation, however, is that no RI3D teams have chosen this design of intake, they have all practically went with the gripper design.

That said, I still believe we’ll see most elite teams use the over the bumper touch & go design, as it has much greater potential. But, it’ll look different than that in the video, it will probably have some complications that will justify using it over a well designed gripper. What will these complications look like? I’m not exactly sure.

So, teams, do you think it’s a good idea to take a little bit of a risk trying to make a non gripper intake (which will probably look like a ball intake), in hopes it’ll outperform the gripper intake? And, do you think it’ll be the meta among top teams?

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I think an over the bumper style intake is an interesting idea, however, to intake from the floor you then need a separate mechanism to perform the handoff (between the OTB intake and whatever lift/arm is used). Another pitfall of OTB this year is the irregular shape of the cone, which doesn’t play well with an intake like you are describing, and could cost a team time on cycling.

Another thing to note, I think a lot of teams aren’t even approaching the idea of picking up cones that aren’t right side up, which is another gap in the usefulness of a OTB intake.

EDIT: Also just because the Ri3D grippers don’t look that good is because it is a robot in 3 days… it’s meant to not be perfect and competition ready, its an idea for a team to build off of. (I think the meta intake will end up being something TIOI as always, but also something light and simple on the end of some insane lift system we all wish we had thought of)

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to intake from the floor you then need a separate mechanism to perform the handoff…

For sure, but that can be figured out, so I’m more interested in the intake. And, top teams will surely not be too troubled by the handoff to the scoring system.

I think a lot of teams aren’t even approaching the idea of picking up cones that aren’t right side up

Maybe, but they probably should because of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HjtO9VMnuY&t=151s&ab_channel=FirstUpdatesNow

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I think that many elite teams will have a full length intake for cubes. These are basically balls, so it’s probably not that hard.

This example from 3940 is what I’ve been showing my students. Seems like it would be pretty simple.

Now cones. I’d imagine some teams will pull off a full length intake, but I’m also betting that other teams you’d consider “great” won’t bother. As long as a roller gripper works fine for auto, I think you will have teams that opt for a smaller robot that can go faster. Full field cycles are important here.

Time will tell though.

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100% agree, grippers are appealing for a Ri3D team because they just work. However, elite, high level, and even below teams will want a touch it, own it style intake and with 6+ weeks to run through the design, prototype, test, iterate cycle I think we will see a lot of intake “evolution” throughout this season.

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Maybe I am a little biased being that my Ri3D team designed a gripper but one thing we found was that the hybrid griper flywheel intake design worked surprisingly well at picking up cubes. If you watch back the ZouKeepers video there should be a few cube pickups where it was touch it own it, and that was after we lost one of the gearboxes on the one of the intake motors. Personally I think improvement to a hybrid style design like that to better support cone pickup could be a relatively good design.

Another idea that comes to mind is running two separate intakes devices, have one bring in the cones and cubes to a consistent position and another pick up the cones and cubes gripper style for placement. Examples of this that come to mind would be 971’s 2018 robot, and 3476 in 2019. Both examples had intakes to feed the game pieces to one position for the second lift intake to take and place.

In the end I think the best solution is just going to end up being whatever a team finds works best with their available resources, for some that may be a gripper, for others that may be a over the bumper design, and a few might find a combination of the two to work best.

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I dont know anything about making the “best” intake, but 4481’s prototype has peaked my interest as a ground pickup option.

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Wouldn’t the cones often get slapped to the side? They’re only trying in from the middle or the right and the cones get slapped to the left. In game, it would probably not be reliable at all and would be a huge headache.

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Well it is a prototype, particularly this would work better with cones than cubes. The weight of the cones would help with it getting flinged away from the intake, but cubes would bounce off if they are on the wrong side of the intake. There are some reliability issues with this one but its a decent idea.

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Over a decade of watching FRC matches has taught me that you cannot rely on lining up straight at the game piece, or having the luxury of standing next to it for 3 seconds while a slow grabber picks it up.

You need to be able to drive full speed at the game piece, hit it off center, and immediately own it.

So I think it’s going to be a wide horizontal roller mechanism that is compliant enough to suck in both cubes and cones, not a pincher or vertical roller solution. I’m not sure there is a solution that has that and the ability to re-orient sideways cones though.

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I’m imagining a sort of formed plastic tumbler (see 2017) that jostles the cones around a bit until they land the “right” way. Then the tumbler stops so the pincher can come in and lift it to the node.

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