As complex trays are dominating the competition, the current goal is to improve the design. One thing I have noticed that is bottlenecking the further improvement is intake speed. To grab the cubes easier, I was wondering if having two layers of chain intake with flaps might increase speed and has anyone tried this out yet?
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Many teams have experimented with double chain, but not for intake efficiency. More chain increases the friction applied to cubes, but this added friction has proven to be unnecessary. Single-chain rollers can intake as fast as cubes are driven into. The biggest flaw with single chain however is reliability. A tremendous amount of matches this season have been lost due to a snapped chain, and with Bo1 that can be lethal. A second chain adds redundancy and reliability, so if the first chain breaks, you aren’t hopeless for the rest of the match.
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having staggered rollers can greatly improve intake efficiency and compression.
gear the outer rollers for speed, because they only need to grab one cube at a time, and gear the inner rollers for torque, so that they can push a lot of cubes up the tray.
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Intakes such as these are able to drive fast and intake fast at the same time. However, many robots have to reduce driver speed because the intake simply doesn’t suck the cubes up fast enough. I was wondering if having the intake physically have more grip and friction on the cubes is what sets these fast speeds apart from slower ones.
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I’m not sure, but I do know that attaching the flaps in pairs reduces slippage, meaning have a long flap, with a very short flap directly behind it, which supports it and forces the cube up. We can pull up 10 cubes with 200 rpm motors and a 1:3 (i think) gear ratio.
