Hi, I’m Koen. I am on a highschool VRC team. Our team (51548B) is not off to a great start but being our first year competing officially we were just working out the kinks.
I am consulting the vex forum and it’s members about intake systems. Currently our robot has a side roller intake system. This intake has been proven effective on other robots we have seen in competition and in previous games. We really had no reason for choosing our intake design other than we were trying to get something done and working. Right now our intake sucks in the balls great but we have to hold the intake in reverse until we want to push it over the barrier or into the goal. This is not ideal because it requires an extra level of focus that can be taken away but I want to know what y’all think we should do.
Keeping this in mind I want to talk about other intake systems as well. Our school’s other robot team (51548A) has performed very effectively. However they went a different path and decided to go with a different intake system. They currently have a horizontal flex wheel intake system that is weighted down and can go up to intake the triballs. All in all it is designed and built great and works awesome. Better than ours for sure. We feel though that with tweaking and better designing we can make our side roller intake just as efficient as our sister team.
There are two other intake systems that are predominantly used in this year’s game as well. These are the horizontal rubber-band and mesh roller intakes. I have seen these two used for most bots that have an intake. They are extremely efficient and provide a plethora of functions due to their wide surface area. The rubber-band roller intake is built from two sprockets on a shaft with rubber-bands intertwined across them. The mesh roller is the same thing but for more grip, a piece of non-slip mesh material is wrapped around the cylindrical shape made by the sprockets and rubber-bands. However these do pose problems that other intake systems don’t. The most predominant one, which is why we stayed away from this system is entanglement. Due to rubber bands being so flexible, they tend to get caught between sharp surfaces or surfaces that may pertrude through the spaces between and cause hang ups. Also being that these intakes will be the outermost part of the bot, other robots that may have pertruding elements, if they come into contact with the roller they may get caught and cause problems.
Concerning structure, lets take a deeper dive into the build of these intakes. The first being the side roller. Side rollers use mainly flex wheels for flexibility and grip. They typically consist of two motors, one for each side. This means a lot of weight for the bot but not too much. The other intake is the horizontal flex wheel intake. This system, in the case of this year’s game is versatile, but due to the nature of how it has to be built, when the ball is sucked in it usually requires the use of another surface to push the ball into the wheels to suck it in, but it does hold the ball very well and is efficient when it comes to scoring balls into the goal. The rubber-band and mesh rollers are fairly light and do most everything as efficiently as the flex wheel roller does. They do tend to get caught though.
Please if you have read this give some feedback and feel free to share pictures and ideas and comment on how we can solve the issue with our intake on our robot so it can hold the triball without pressing the button until we want to release it.
I would recommend horizontal flex wheels. We started with rubber band and it worked really well, except for getting entangled. A solution for this is a mesh roller. lots of teams have thrived using this, but you have to replace the rubber bands under the mesh every so often and it’s hard to tell when to do so. We settled on small flex wheels, as they are pretty easy to set up, don’t get entangled and are consistent. here is a picture of our intake rn
we are planning to add intake sleds to help us score in goal more consistently but I’m really loving this intake. my only suggestion is making sure you aren’t hinging intake too far forward. this can lead to difficulties intaking as well as possessing, as well as trouble scoring in goal from intake.
We don’t have flex wheels but flex wheels would be the best.
1 they grip the tribals. 2 if you have a sprocket intake you can get tangled . 3 if you do side rollers you have to aim at right direction to get them in. 4 you prob could do mesh because robokauz (really good team) did them and it worked well. but I would do mesh or flex wheel intakes.
My team hasn’t experienced any issues with this yet. How many times has this happened to you and throughout how many matches? Just asking so that my team can make a well-informed decision in the future.
I noticed in your picture that there is no place for the triball to rest after you intake it. I’ve seen teams utilize rubber bands, string, or even c-channels for this.
I completely agree, this could get you called out at a competition.
Ok that fair.
My team has been tangled 2 times this season while trying to push the other teams robot backwards.or we get pushed we get tangled. but our latest time we got tangled it was from us trying to stop a team from going under the bar they rammed into us then we got stuck for a second. Then we tried driving forwards then we got tangled.so now I have to correct myself. I would recommend to make a sprocket/ mesh intake or a flex wheel intake
Yeah, Rubber Bands are good but has its own cons like
“They Will Break”
But then the grip is amazing
You just have to keep rubber bands on you whenever you go to a competition
we had them at our first tourney and they weren’t a huge issue, but whenever we played/ scrimmed w higher level teams such as 3142Y we would get entangled bc of our aggressive play style.
Yeah this was from earlier this week, we just zip tied some rubber bands across the intake chamber to hold triballs
In my opinion, Horizontal Flex Wheel Rollers are harder to intake. Using rollers with flex wheels are faster and you can push them into the goal easily when you have sleds on the intake.
As for lightest, that would be a rubber band-mesh intake.
As for efficient, both flex wheels and rubber band-mesh are the same.
However, whichever route you go, make it as hard as possible for other robots to steal your balls (for when the match strategy starts to go towards “hunger games”), especially teams like at the sugar rush finals where you fight over every triball (maybe have a pneumatic flap or something).
@HenryTheCutie I was just wondering how you made that plastic for your slapper-- I saw Gremlin talk about making a mold out of trophies and wondered if you did the same thing. If so, any advice on how to build one?
Most of the teams over here in Utah are using the rubber band intake. My team uses this and it works really well. The issue of entanglement only came up once and after that we just put anti slip mat over the rubber bands and we haven’t been entangled since.
nah we wanna be like gremlin but we’re too lazy. I just put it in a vice and bent it. gremlins is better, and if you have the time/resources I would do that. also ours is unnecessarily big so if your making a similar design, make it smaller like gremlins. we just had plenty of plastic and were rushing to be ready for a tourney so I didn’t cad it.
yeah, entanglement only is an issue with the exposed rubber bands, anti slip mat intakes and flex wheel intakes are apt equal in every way, I just prefer flex wheel bc I don’t have to worry abt replacing rubber bands ever.
@Koen_Hill
Either rubber bands or flex wheels. I did notice though that a lot of high-ranking teams used flex wheels and flex wheels have become a more popular option.
