Are passive intakes really that good? So far i haven’t seen one that consistently picks up cones. Although claws are heavier & harder to operate, they leave a lot of room for correction. If a passive intake picks up a cone at a weird angle, it would be more difficult to let go to pick it up again correctly (this isn’t the biggest issue unless you are stacking on the robot).
Are there any reasons to use a passive intake?
I would use a claw, passive is a little harder to grasp cones with.
I used to use a really good passive intake, but I am changing to something else that I am working on currently. 
From what I’ve seen (mostly 7700R) passive intakes can absolutely dominate Fielding cones with ease. However, there are active intakes that can also field as well as they can do match loads. In my opinion, passives are made for Fielding while actives (mostly rollers) are best in the match loads.
Honestly it totally depends on the overall design of your robot.
If your design requires loading from the front/above rollers and passive intakes work pretty well
If your design requires loading from the back/the side claws seem more popular
I’m a claw main. Not really much I can name that the extra motor would benefit from, especially when that motor is coming from a claw.
I think it largely depends on driver skill. Passive intakes carry a lot more design benefits, but are harder to operate, claws are much less effective as far as design goes, but are much easier to drive.
The thing is you’re going to have to pick up cones one at a time. So having a passive intake or not will only affect the time by just a little bit.
The idea of a passive intake is great, but I am currently working on a new design and I don’t know how I will be able to internal stack with it. I have already made an active one that would work great, but I will be able to use an extra motor without it.
Just make a passive intake that can field and do match loads. Not that hard.
I don’t see how passive intakes are any less good at driver loads than the field. The driver load cones are literally just elevated field cones. As long as you lift your lift to the right height, there’s no real difference.
I completly agree. The tradeoff for passive vs active is speed and weight (Passive) vs consistency and resiliency (active). If all goes well in driving, passive is superior, but things always go wrong, and active can more easily deal with that.
The main problem most people think of with passives doing the loader is simply that you have to stack a few cones on the mobile goal unless you take a cone, drive back, scored it etc. I don’t really think that’s much of a problem personally but I believe that’s the main thing people bring up when talking about passives and the loader. Just fyi
But once you get past the first few cones I don’t think there’s any reason a passive claw couldn’t be as fast or faster than an active claw when it comes to the driver loads(as long as your claw has a stable release at those heights).
ah thanks, I didn’t realize that.
Because of this, I think that a semi-passive claw will be the most effective overall. By semi-passive, I mean passive intake and the ability for a 7700r-style release, but a motorized release as well. This way, it has all the benefits of an active claw, and that quick passive cycle. Of course, it takes an extra motor, adding weight, but I do think that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
i think the ultimate solution to this whole problem is going to be the development of passive claws. Most of the drawbacks can be fixed, and we’re going to see better and better passive claws as the season goes on until active claws aren’t really even in the running.
Rollers or Passive, claws are pretty slow in my experience.
Not really, take a look at 8675A. They’re much faster than any rollers I’ve seen.
A couple of months ago in collaboration with 21S, we had created a ziptie intke that was shared onto the discord server before. The intake at the time was built for externals and had worked really well. It did take a lots of patterns and different methods to make it work reliably.
I have included a few pics and vids of it in action.
Do keep in mind that this was back in September and there was very little driving done before taking these vids.
2900D / 21S
Here’s a video on our instagram that shows our passive intake from 2 weeks ago.
The intake works beautifully, but that robot had many things to optimize (lift and manipulator speed).
We will probably post unblurred videos of that iteration in ~2-3 weeks.
Except for the part when it doesn’t 