As the title implies, I’m wondering who is going to harvest this year. [Most] Everything I’ve found on Chief Delphi is about shooting, and a little bit about climbing (mostly about how hard it is, and how not to do it).
So, what are your plans?
Have a super accurate shooter, and you may not need ground pickup. If you feel like you’ll be missing a lot of shots, or will need to travel the field length each time to make shots, then you may want to pick up off the ground.
This is a great plan as long as both of your partners are also armed with Frisbee Sniper Rifles.
I realize that, I’m just wondering who IS going to harvest. I also wonder how many teams have a shooter that accurate. 
We are working on it and hope to have a successful picker-upper.
So far we have a device that can reliably lift them off the floor using two sets of wheels with a vertical axis. Our prototype call also pick them up if they are against a wall or in a corner. Hopefully we can post a pic or video this weekend.
Transport to the shooter is not solved yet but we have a prototype that works a little bit, sometimes, on good days.
Our thinking is this: the easiest way to get frisbees to shoot might be to have a good shooter down by the slots. If he misses we can pick them up and convert them. Anyway, that’s the thinking.
Good strategy. We could be the robot sending discs up from the feed slots. We might score 0-10% directly, but if one or both of our alliance partners can pick up and score, it could be lots of points.
We are not planning on picking up off the floor. Hopefully we’ll pick a partner who can.
Our team has a plan to pick up off the floor, but if we can’t get it done we will still be able to get frisbees from the feeder station.
There will be many teams who will try but those who succeed efficiently will be few.
Always design your robot with the belief that there will not be two other robots on your alliance. Any time you rely on team members for a portion of your strategy, you will have matches that are completely outside your ability to control and you will lose.
That pretty much segways into all the design choices that we made this year. We can’t do everything, but we don’t rely on our alliances partners to be able to do anything.
It doesn’t always work - this year is a perfect example of a year that is incredibly hard to do everything, much less do everything well. So you pick the functions that you least care about and won’t really affect how your strategy plays out. I’m a big proponent of strategy-driven design, rather than design driven strategy.
That should answer your question on which direction we picked, in a round-about sort of way.
Although I selected “climb only + auto” we may not do auto. Depends on how our testing goes once we have our bot built.
This year’s slogan: “There are discs?”
We are picking up from the floor. We will be one of the best dang floor pickups there are*.
*maybe
We think that it’s important, my personal reasoning being that you can’t be sure whether or not every match will be perfectly beneficial for a human loaded or floor loaded system. Having a consistent human loaded shooter will make you a good second pick in most elims, and being able to clean up your opponents frisbees and either feeding them or scoring them yourself will make you a great third pick anywhere at the very least.
Depending on where you’re playing, having a good human loaded shooter could mean you’re picking your alliance. Having a harvester that works only in autonomous, combined with that good human loaded shooter, might put you in the top five.
Our first goal was feeder station and good shooter which we have completed and we have our hanging mechanism getting completed, now we have a sub group working on floor pick up. We left room in the robot so if we wanted to add anything room was there such as after a tournament etc.
It was nearly unanimous on the day after kickoff that we wanted to pickup from the floor.
A few days later we decided that picking up off the floor was going to be the last thing on our list.
With our limited resources this year we decided that spending time on floor pickup probably wasn’t worth our time as it doesn’t gain you points (except in autonomous) just “options”. With that said we are focusing on a shooter and climber. At this time floor pickup doesn’t look so good for us due to the constraint’s given to us (54" rule…) and our strategy.
How long would it take to scoop up and accurately shoot 10 disks scattered about the field for 30 points? Probably longer than climbing the tower for 30. (depending on your climber.) 
Our team is actively pursuing floor pickup with some decent results. Our intake system will likely be a bit different from others, but prototypes show some great success. The real difficulty in this is working dimensions so this system will fit in the frame perimeter and the 54" cylinder.
We have created a system for picking up frisbees that is just as fast our intake last year for basketballs (we attached it to our robot from last year and were picking up frisbee in sight). If there are no frisbees to pick up, we are planning on being able to load our robot through the feeding station.
“frisbee sniper rifles”
first, lolz.
second, we have one:D
we decided day one that we were going to focus on a shooter instead of picking up, mostly because of the smaller frame and some of our thoughts on climbing.
Having floor pickup will be critical for those teams that want to seed high. A team with a good harvester and shooter and decent programmers could score up to 54 points in autonomous. That’s probably enough to clinch the second-order ranking sort, and possibly win most regional/district matches.
I agree with Pat here guys. Any team that isn’t making an intake, you are missing out on on seeding high where other teams will be making plenty in autonomous.
(This year’s ranking system is dictated by auto score after qualification scores)