And then it hit me....

[Nate Smith]

Having worked a few regionals last year, there are a few things from FIRST's standpoint that make this ruling regarding shipping direct from one event to the next considerably easier to understand. At both of the events I volunteered at last season, there were at least a few machines that did not arrive with the shipment from the drayage site on Wednesday. In some of these cases, FIRST had no knowledge that the team was going to be bringing the robot to the event site themselves, and went into a panic mode because of a missing robot. Also, as Joe mentioned, it may be a way to help cut costs for the sponsors. Re-engineering costs aside, consider those teams who attend two consecutive events:

Saturday: Leave event, bring robot home
Tuesday: Robot shipped to next event
Tuesday: Robots loaded onto a truck from drayage to the event site.
Wednesday: Truck from drayage arrives at event site, robots are unloaded.

In essence, the robot has to leave the team's hands and arrive at drayage simultaneously, in order to arrive in time to be taken from drayage to the event.

However, my feelings are somewhat mixed on this issue. My personal feeling is that we should be able to make repairs(not improvements, unless necessary to correct a chronic malfunction) for the normal 3 day period after an event, however, I do not feel that we need the robot to be able to do that. I know the "no improvements" rule is a hard one to enforce, however, I feel it is one of the areas where gracious professionalism comes into play.