What do you guys think are the most efficient claw designs to pick up cones? Our claw is horrible and takes 100% perfect accuracy to pick up a cone.
What are some designs that don’t need to be so accurate?
See/search for the “cellar intake”, “goliath intake”, and rollers. There are many forums describing these. Also search youtube, because that’s where they’re usually posted.
I use a couple of small rollers (rubber intake gears on a shaft with rubber bands strung between their teeth) with a cone alignment thing extending from the chassis so i can drive into a cone and get it into the perfect position.
the alignment thing is just a fork make of two c-channels that can loosely fit a cone between them. I then strung rubber bands between them and ziptied them to get the perfect front-to-back distance.
Yes, it helps to have something that pushes the cone so you drive into the cone and not worry about the position. If you post a current pic of your claw i might be able to help. Also, what kind of robot is yours? If u use a dr4b then it would be better to use a roller intake.
Yeah we have a double reverse four bar. The problem with a roller intake is that we don’t have enough space. The ends of our double reverse four bars barely have any space between them and we struggled to get any sort of claw in the space we have. Also, if we do manage to get enough space, roller intakes are kind of thick. They will make our robot stick out of 18 inches.
As for our current claw, I don’t have a picture, but it’s simply two c- channels with standoffs on them that are sticking downward. They have no gear ratio, so the motors is constantly having to run when we pick up a cone.
Usually, for a claw I would use a form of “bendy metal” to form a curvature shape and then find the desired placement for the most accurate way to pick up cones. However, a form of “golaith intake” (really just rollers) will absolutely demolish a claw due to it being very east to pick up cones with. May I ask, is you DR4B an external?
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