Moving stuff from here to there: Logistics the unsung hero of FRC teams

[Foster]

Two threads here, this one is about moving your team.

You are the robotics logistics person. You identify, pack, load, move, unpack, deploy, wait, repack, reload, reship, and unload at home. You put 100 pounds of robot in a 50 pound crate. You think in cubic inches, wasted movements are the bane. You are the George Cloony (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_%282009_film%29) of robot movements around the world. World champs live and die at your skills.

Tell us your story! Best move, worst move, snakes on the plane. Israel, how do you get to the states? Hawaiian kids, pros at packing, tell us what's in your travel bag.

[Cothron Theiss]

I don't think I qualify as the logistics guru from my team, but I was a big part of two permanent moves in consecutive years, and I was around when my team went to Worlds as a freshman. I've also driven several robots around in my time on the team.

Our journey to Worlds was an interesting one, to say the least. We qualified for Worlds at a Week 5 event our Rookie year. We... were not very prepared. Our priorities were raising the money to go, preparing our withholding allowance (a cheesecaked frisbee blocker and an improved intake), building our crate, and getting our pit ready. We ended up forgetting a few important things like our whiteboard, and extra batteries for our power tools. Our school's prom was the Saturday of Champs, so we actually put it to a vote to see if we'd stay to watch Einstein and the closing ceremonies (assuming we didn't make Eliminations of our division) or rush back home to make it time for Prom. The team was almost entirely upperclassmen that year, so the majority decided to head home the minute we were done competing and try to make it back to Prom. This included the hilarious spectacle of everyone who was actually going to Prom changing into their outfits on the bus on the way back from Champs.
We ended up getting caught in traffic, and didn't get back until the Prom was pretty much over. Still pretty miffed that we chose to rot on a bus in standstill traffic rather than watching the most exciting show of the season.

Pretty soon after Champs our Rookie year, we had to move out. We were fortunate enough to be housed with two other teams in an amazing facility, but our spot was specifically for Rookie teams in the area, so we moved into a room on one of our school's campus. (We transitioned from a school team to a county team after our Rookie year.) The room, totaling about 120 sq. ft., was actually the closet to the school's declining wood shop. It was obviously pretty tight in there, especially because a lot of our floor space was taken up by our storage containers, tools, and our robot crate. We ended up removing the top side and door of our robot create and turning the lumber into shelving inside the crate itself. We had to do a lot of work keeping track of our own stuff, and making sure everything was kept clean, tidy, and with everything put back where it was supposed to go. The ridiculously small amount of space kinda forced us to learn good shop hygiene, though we did have issues with people leaving tools inside the robot.
A lot of our moves actually involved using a student's trailer being pulled by a different student's parent carrying several thousand dollars of what was then school property. We were probably (definitely) breaking all sorts of school board policies and there was no way the insurance would cover us if something had happened. Thankfully since then, we've bought a trailer that's team property and is only pulled by either our head mentor and faculty representative, or one designated parent (and one recently graduated alumnus, but we pretend that doesn't happen since he wouldn't be covered by the insurance). We also went through the hassle of making sure the school's insurance would cover us if something were to happen.

Since the only Regional we go to is close enough to drive to, taking our robot to competition is easy. My senior year, we didn't want to ask any of our mentors to take off work for robot load-in, so we actually just took several students who drove themselves and an alumnus pulled the trailer with his truck.


I'm not sure if that's exactly what you're looking for, but that's some of my team's struggle with logistics over the year. Getting a team trailer has made our lives much easier and our blood pressures much lower. Keeping in line with school board policies has been tricky, especially with members from 4-ish different high schools, but it's always been worth it.