Since most of you have competed at atleast one compeition, what peg intake have you found most useful for precise quick completion?
We competed at our first competition as a high school team last week and the team that I would guess as having the best Skyrise intake was a pneumatic claw. However the first seed at the competition was a very simple clawbot who could only build a skyrise 2 sections tall, but they had so much driving practice they went 6-0. In the end I think it will come down to driver practice and not just the intake.
Here in Wisconsin, claws have been what most teams have chosen to go with. Some have just used the vexplorer claw and adjust it to be powered by pneumatics.
I personally think that the plunger intakes are a bit less time effective because after placing the skyrise section in place you have to lift up and then go down to grab the next skyrise section. Where as with the claw, you can go down for your next skyrise section right after you let go.
We were planning to use a claw, but ended up using a friction plunger because we didn’t have enough time.
I think a motorized or pneumatic claw is your best option because it is very fast and easy to use. The issue we had with the friction system was that it took time to line it up, make sure it grabs it, and then release it in the skyrise. Also, if the intake wasn’t in properly, the section could come out if we shook around a lot. With a claw that should not be a problem.
One design that I say was very effective was a pneumatic plunger. One of the advantages of their’s was also that it was very small, so alignment in the section was much easier, and then expanded to grab it.
Edit: We also noticed that some of the sections at competition were quite worn out, which seemed to have an effect on how well they grip together in the tower, sometimes giving issues with the friction.
My team uses an intake with the same basic idea as that in a youtube video by Bots n’ stuff (BNSw - Passive Skyrise Section Intake - YouTube) and we were able to get a score of 47 in skills,( about 1 skyrise section in 6 seconds)
For our intake we started out using a standard VEX claw. We recently discovered that our field at school had been put together incorrectly and realized this was why we had trouble getting our pegs out of the peg holder all of this time at school. before we realized this though, we modified the VEX claw by adding metal and grippy mesh to extend it, and it works quite efficiently for us!
We tried a passive intake but could never get it to work how we wanted it to, so the claw has been our best intake for pegs so far.
Our team has been using a two piston claw for the past month and it’s been serving us extremely well. Each side is basically two 1x5x1x5 c-channels connected at a 90 degree angle with mesh attached, and although it may not be the most efficient intake ever it’s definitely one of the top intakes. Our first robot used a plunger, which definitely is hard to line up if the lift is not stable. The claw is much easier to line up with, though.
Another thing we find extremely useful is a skyrise aligner, which for us was a tiny one-stage scissor that allowed the robot to back up towards the skyrise base at a wider range of angles and drop the skyrise section onto the tower without having to worry about shifting the robot little by little to get it perfectly lined up.