While many teams use passive intakes like claws to pick up the cones this season, we chose to do an active intake system instead. Our intake uses two compliant wheels chained to motor in a way that they spin in opposite directions to intake the cone from the top. Reversing the motor drops the cone.

One challenge of doing it this way was picking up the top cone from the stack without knocking it over. Our initial prototype picked up cones straight above them, but we found it difficult to pick up the top cone of a stack without tipping them over. To solve this problem, we took our intake system and tested it at multiple angles.

We found that a 30 degree angle works best at picking up single cones as well as cones on top of cone stacks. That angle has the added benefit of helping us score cones on the junctions in a way that would be more difficult if we tried to score them straight on.

We discovered as we put together the intake that it began to take the shape of a dragon head. We decided to add eyes and theme the entire robot after this discovery. Thus DRAGON was born!