In the early season I’ve seen some CAD renders of tray bots for Change Up. All of the reveals of finished robots I’ve seen have been the “Snailbots”, and I’ve been wondering are there any teams that are actually building the tray bots, and what the reasons are for why you’re doing this.
The reason people are opting towards hoodbots as opposed to traybots is pretty simple. In the early season, right after the reveal, traybots looked like they would be meta. Yet, some team made a hoodbot, and it was quickly favored because of it’s quick cycle time, as well as being much smaller than an extended tray(from TT). I’d also like to think people hate having the bejesus scared out of them at the beginning of auton.
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Aside from cycle time, which is a huge factor, are there any other perks a traybot has opposed to a hoodbot?
A trayboy can quickly transform into a wallbot with a simple maneuver of the drive base.
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Tray it’s can hover over goals to block other robots from scoring, but I bet a snail it with some modifications could do this too
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If you want to see more discussions of the two designs there are also plenty of threads you could visit to read over older discussion
FTFY. In all seriousness traybots take up a lot of space which can be used defensively if coordinated well with your team mate. Although I might add that a faster more nimble snail bot may be able to outmaneuver a tray bot and get around any defensive situation.
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you didnt need to fix it, that was the joke, but ok.
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traybots, while still competitive, are inferior to hoods. But if you don’t have the ability to build a good hoodbot, a traybot could be the way to go, I think it’s easier to get a traybot to an acceptable level of speed compared to a hood. But a possibly better route to go for beginner teams is a conveyor type ramp bot. One of these was able to win the vex in the tent event, despite being against 2 decent hoodbots.
That said, a hoodbot definetely is the fastest type of robot when done well, so if you have the skills (really doesn’t take much skill compared to traybots last year) you should probably just go with a hood.
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You could make a tray bot that has arms and then lifs the tray up instead of a 4 bar lift with mounted intakes to descore
We have a first year 6th grade team. Because they are new we went with a simple four bar lift tray bot. Intaking is fast because we have an overhead roller. But we currently can not de-score.
Err… This is basically Elevation-era technology… 
And it was superseded by 6-bar.
But you are right, it is a good start for beginners teams.
But still, I would rather beginner teams go straight to trying 6-bar instead. It is definitely very achievable.
For beginner teams, if you are interested to build the conveyor belt intake and scoring, just take a look at Elevation.
And if you are interested to build a 6-bar side-roller intake and scoring, then take a look at Gateway.
Lots of resources there 
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Meng, with age comes wisdom. Going pretty far back in vex history there my friend.
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