Has anyone thought about using rollers and some sort of funneling system? By a funneling system I mean something that passivley uprights the cones? Any ideas out there? I think that itll be interesting to see what people come up with other than claws.
I feel that using rollers will be difficult as you cannot get a straight grip on the cone. Sure, past objects such as balls had curves - but at the halfway point they were “parallel” to any roller. With a constantly slanted cone it would be very hard to get pull on the cone. Unless the rollers used standoffs or some other form of peg to pull in using the concave portions of the cone… I’d love to see someone pull this off though.
Another option is to purposefully knock over cones using a bar in front of a horizontal intake roller, meaning each cone would come in the same orientation despite already being knocked over or standing up upon initial contact. Once cones come in in a constant position, it would be much easier to right them and then pick them up internally.
If you were allowed to have multiple game objects, then side rollers might be a good idea. But <SG9> strikes again!
It would seem to me that while the roller intake is very efficient for picking up cones, how would it drop them? The game designers heavily restricted the mechanisms this season…
I don’t see a rule prohibiting dropping of cones. I still think side rollers are very viable this season (and I also predict seeing a ton of robots with side rollers this year), plus I still see diversity of mechanisms this season coming. As to the dropping itself, the cone probably won’t need to be dropped. The robot can just roll the cone out of its side roller intake once the cone is stacked. The mobile goals are another question though.
I definitely would think that side rollers would be a viable option if you could hold more than one cone at a time. With this restriction though, side rollers would just add extra weight and make precisely handling the cones harder. I would love to be proven wrong though because this year will get really boring if everyone has a claw.
I have a feeling we are gonna see a lot more design convergence this year than last year.
I think so as well, there are very few possible designs that can work efficiently.
Agreed