me and my team have been having dificulties with chosing between a standoff roller intake or an anti slip roller intake. Any help would be appreciated. Other suggestions will also be considered.
If other please state your opinion.
Thanks
4549B
This year there are as many roller designs as there are roller robots, and I don’t think there is any absolute agreement on what is best, even within your two categories. If you are talking about a standoff roller, what length standoffs? how many? what spacing between? and if you want a grip mat roller, what size? what type of grip mat? what do you have under the grip mat?
what seems to be a general trend (not claiming absolutes here) is that standoff/bolt rollers are slightly better at descoring, but suffer jamming and throwing over more often while intaking.
We still use a c channel chainsaw intake which jacko used on his first robot.
I have a feeling that a wallbot like the one in this thread will be the one that will win worlds: https://vexforum.com/t/project-glados/23277/1
According to other people who have played with them (or a similar wallbot, i’m not sure), they were very easy to defeat.
Back to the thread, we personally use a standoff and flap intake, but not in the conventional sense… (I won’t go into detail), but it seems to descore better, because it has more protruding to grip sacks in troughs better. Then again, after watching the NZ matches, i’m not entirely sure of that.
They were out of size so couldn’t compete lol. I’m sure they’ve finished their modifications and are ready for worlds.
Without giving too much away, I think that the type of ideal intake roller depends on a number of factors such as the other “sack carrying” component of your intake, the size and shape of the intake, etc. Of course like StimpNZ said, the different variables that could be changed on the intake usually cause the intake to be better at one thing and not as good as the other. I would advise that you try out (all) intakes to see which one fits your robot the best.
Omni Wheels work great for us but the problem is the same of that with leg wheels; too much grip. It’s like a circular saw that doesn’t cut. It holds onto it but when you connect a chain it works so well.
My vote: Omni or Mecanum Wheels.
From my experience, there are a lot of good top roller designs, but the best way to find the best one for your robot is to just make a whole bunch and just test them all out and compare results. Put them all on your robot and time how long it takes you to clear one side of the field with each one. Then see how long it takes for each one to descore a half full trough (because full troughs are much more easy to descore). Then take these results and see which which roller gives you the results you desire. This is a very important portion of the engineering process and it will help your team immensely to do this with every aspect of a robot!
And then write the results in your engineering notebook. 
Yes, that^ lol.
Some of it depends on your intake table. Anti-slip rollers tend to work better with conveyor intakes, whereas standoff rollers tend to accompany pneumatic angle-changing polycarb ramps that can lie flat while collecting and descoring. Granted, there are some exceptions (2915A has a great stand-off/conveyor combination), but this is the general trend that I have noticed.