So the season’s been going on for a bit now, and we’ve seen quite a few different designs for internal stackers. Besides lift type, the biggest difference I’ve seen is whether or not they swing backwards to stack on the mobile goal (ex. 929U, the Osizr, 1045A), or stack on the mobile goal on the front of their bot (ex. 10N, the 7617 scissorlift bots, 315X). I’m curious to see which people think is better. personally, I think the forward is better because it requires less lift time, but it also requires more driver precision.
The ones that swing backward cannot stack as high. You mentioned the season has been going for a while. Some robots in GA at least from what I have seen, can do 20-25 cones per match. The backward swing lifts cannot match in terms of stacking height and stacking speed. I would say they probably were good for the beginning of the season but now it is hard for them to survive. Also the driver precision thing is just PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE. So I agree that the forward is better.
We used to have a backwards stacker, the main reason we switched to forward was that the robot would drive in one direction to pick up a goal and a different one to get cones, this made it more difficult to stack in the corner areas because we would have to turn around to grab the cones after I taking a goal as opposed to just picking up a cone that was next the goal. We also found that the internal stacking mechanisms had to have a larger range of motion to creat a stack, right now the four bar that we have on our forward internal stacker only has to rotate 90 degrees to be positioned above the goal as opposed to almost 270 when swinging around to stack in the back of the robot.