No-show teams and trailers

[Richard Wallace]

Back-in-the-day (before the alliance era) FIRST provided a Placebo robot to fill no-show slots. The Placebo had no scoring capability, and fairly limited mobility. One such Placebo was actually a hovercraft, IIRC. I don't recall if there were others.

Perhaps FIRST should provide non-functional Placebo robots to stand in for no-shows in Lunacy. Placebos could be built using the AM C-Base chassis with no drivetrain, fitted with standard bumpers and trailer hitch, and ballasted to the maximum inspection weight. Trailers assigned to no-show teams would be hitched to Placebos instead.

Alternately, perhaps no-shows should simply be prohibited. Put another way, teams might be required to place a robot on the field and hitch it to a trailer, whether they think it can be competitive or not. A non-functional robot would behave much like the Placebo described above, and would save FIRST the cost of deploying and maintaining several for each event.