Glenn,
If you sign up for the Queen City Regional and you are not able to get an exemption. I will personally except the crate at my home and bring it with me in our team trailer for load in.
You beat me to punch Dave!
Jared is on the money here. If you don’t abide by the honor system, there’s not much reason for you to compete in something where the real engineering challenge is to do incredible things on such a tight deadline. You will end up cheating yourself of the experience.
We haven’t had any reported incidents so far, so I don’t expect any.
For the past two years we have had to ship our robot to the CMP from the home of team 1241, Rick Hansen SS in Mississauga Ontario, because FedEx does not offer shipping to our city. Last year a team from Mexico who attended GTR also had their crate shipped to Rick Hansen both in and out, and I would guess this is how the process would work for other teams who can’t bring a robot with them. We had qualified the week before and brought the crate with us to GTR in a pickup, but in 2010 there was a team that didn’t have one, and had to borrow one from a local team. We have to ship to a warehouse in Toronto on the way back, so a local company can pick it up and truck it home where FedEx doesn’t cover.
Without naming any names or places, this isn’t true. At least one regional had a rookie team that didn’t know they were supposed to stop building. Another team at another event unbagged longer than allowed. In one particular case, a team blatantly modified their robot after ship date.
Lame…well hopefully this year everyone will help each other make sure they all know the rules?
I can vouch for the size of said team trailer. Tis quite large. 
I have also encountered a few probable instances of deliberate violations of the hands-off rules. Large-scale violations are probably not widespread, but they give a huge advantage to the teams that are tempted to cheat.
I don’t think there’s much overhead involved in submitting a few photos to FIRST on ship day. Anyone with an cellphone and an e-mail account could do this.
And if FIRST wanted to physically verify a couple teams, that would have a strong deterrent effect: either the teams would have to plan their cheating around a possible visit, or when the school administration learns of the visit, they’ll have to explain why they’re hurriedly stuffing the robot into a bag. This has a fair bit of overhead for FIRST volunteers, but on the scale of a couple non-randomly-selected teams per regional, it’s quite doable.
It’s not my intention to be burdensome, but the honour system isn’t really enough to prevent teams from bending rules. They come up with all sorts of justifications for their transgressions, but inevitably it comes down to the idea that they’re ignoring an implicit resource constraint that is supposed to apply equally to all teams, as a core tenet of the competition. I think FIRST is right to draw a bright line on ship day, because, as you said, it’s just a competition, and the ideal alternative from the perspective of a team—equitably assessing who deserves more time—is incredibly difficult.
Some teams work in secured facilities where getting the designated FIRST representative access could be a time consuming process, giving the team plenty of notice of the visit. If you believe additional verification is necessary, pictures would be a much easier solution.
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Sure, why not? Millions of tons of cargo go zipping across the country all the time, why not another crate?
Pictures can be faked, like anything else.
Bag & Tag is, at its best, a great solution and a real convenience. At its worst it is a mere inconvenience and expense. This is an easy problem to solve, folks, don’t worry much.[/quote]
I knew this was coming, but it’s going to make for some interesting logistics.
Let’s see -
Florida - Ship BAG N’ TAG in CRATE
Mount Olive - CRATE arrives with BAG N’ TAG
(Thus because it arrived there in a CRATE it still has to go out in a CRATE)
Lenape - Still have the BAG N’ TAG and CRATE
Saint Louis - Do we still need to BAG N’ TAG at this point?
LOL this is hilarious to me and confusing all at the same time! Good luck to everyone with this BAG N’ TAG process. 
Cass
This is a great idea, the only thing you have to worry about is getting that robot to the competition from the location you ship it to. I like the idea though!
Cass
Here’s how I think it would work, in your case, presuming that you are allowed to ship to Florida.
Ship Bag & Tag in Crate to Florida
Ship Bag & Tag in Crate to home. Remove robot, still bagged.
Take Bag & Tag to Mount Olive
Take Bag & Tag to Lenape
Take Bag & Tag to home.
Ship Bag & Tag in Crate to Saint Louis.
Thanks for the invite!
Some of us actually visited your city during the summer after IRI.
Maybe the following year.
Glenn
I think the exemptions are only for teams like overseas, ie. Israel
I’m pretty sure every other team will have to provide their own methods for going like cross country
Maybe not even isreal… they have a local regional already.
Teams from Hawaii also count as overseas.
I’m pretty sure every other team will have to provide their own methods for going like cross country
Why do you think that? Bill’s Blog seems to say otherwise.
Great. We’re spoiled to live here…We have all four seasons, activities to do all year round and best of all - EVERYWHERE we vacation is more exciting than here.
I’ll have to stop by and visit you all this summer when I’m on my vacation around the islands. See you in St Louis.
Yes, I imagine HI teams going to any events in the lower 48 or Canada will be allowed to CRATE it.
I also imagine for example that teams from WA/OR/(Other PNW states) going to FL/GA for a regional will also be allowed to crate it.
The non-US/Canada teams coming to a US/Canadian event (I’m looking at you, Great Britain and Brazil) are probably also going to be allowed to crate.
It makes sense. The old way was very costly and extremely unsustainable, given the massive growth of the competition. Also, not requiring a drayage facility opens up more possibilities for venue choices.
In 1992 there were ~30 teams IIRC, 11 years later, When 1075 started in 2003, there were maybe 600 active teams. 8 years later, there are now well over 2000 active teams. The competition is growing at an accelerating rate.
A management consultant at my workplace gave me an interesting analogy some time ago:
Hypothetical person owns a company cutting grass.
He starts working on his own, with a pair of scissors. At first, he only has 1 or 2 customers, so its not a problem that it takes him a long time to cut a lawn. All of a sudden though, 2 more people want their lawn cut. There arent enough hours in the day. So he gets a manual push mower. Now he can do 10 lawns a day instead of 2. Theres another capacity plateau, before he has to get a motorized push mower. And another when he gets a riding lawn mower, and again when he has to hire people to help him keep up with demand.
Most businesses have these capacity plateaus, where there’s a major investment required (in time, money, resources, whatever) to increase capacity. Most things don’t have the ability to smoothly adjust capacity to demand. Maybe your workshop needs to get physically bigger so you can hire more people, but now during the times you’re not busy, you have a much larger overhead cost. In our lawn-cutting example, what happens during the winter months, when there’s no need to cut grass, but he still has to pay the loan back to the bank on the riding mower.
I think FIRST’s current format is rapidly running out of capacity. As Bill and others have mentioned, we need to change the format of CMP in the next few years, or the growth at the regional level will fill ALL CMP slots with teams qualified at regionals. We need to cut costs at the regional (district/qualifier) level, in order to continue growing the program, so that more events can be set up cheaper AND we lower the barrier of FRC’s high cost-of-entry. More events means more people needed to run them, means more fields, means more slots for teams to fill. IIRC there were 14 Logomotion fields travelling the regional circuit last year. Remember, the current format of CMP uses 8 alone (the four divisional fields, einstein, the two practice fields, and an 8th field in the truck ready to go in case one of the others has issues).
On the bright side, teams like my old team (in which the shipping rep came early enough that we could never work on Tuesday) get a few extra hours with the robot.