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. 
Interesting enough, there are still logistical issues that have to be coordinated for HI teams.
Teams from neighbor islands still have to crate, even though they decide to ONLY do the HI regional which takes place on Oahu, HI.
If HI is our first regional of the season, we would need to bag-tag it, bring it to the HI tournament, take it home after the tournament, crate it, then ship from our school to the next regional.
If we decide to do a regional in the mainland first, I’d assume that the shipping point to and from HI would be our school, which isnt the case for neighbor island teams.
For mainland teams choosing to do the HI regional, FIRST will provide two FedEX airbills to help cover the travel cost of your robot/crate.
We are trying to have a tools supply area for teams to borrow, coming from either the neighbor islands or outside HI, so that they dont have to bring all their tools with them in the crate (making it more expensive to ship).
Consider a HI robot cart rental service too and teams would just have to bring themselves.
Just curious: Is there a car ferry service that could fit, say, a typical passenger van, that runs between islands? Is it as expensive as I would fear? If so, perhaps loading a van with everything but the humans and sending it that way…
I suppose robots won’t fit in the overhead bins?
(OK, maybe minibots…)
No, there is no ferry between the Islands, only cruise ships. Hey, that might be interesting?? Coming from the Big Island, it definitely puts a roadblock in our attempts to do a Mainland regional. Where to ship the crate to (assuming we get an exemption?) now we’d have to rent a truck to get the robot, bumpers, controls, tools and spare parts there, and then load it all back in at this “friendly” location that held our crate for us for a few weeks and have it shipped home from there. Who would unload a 400+ lb crate for us from the shippers? Move it and store it at your place? Let us open it up the day before competition? Come back late after the competition so we can re-pack it? Move it out so our shipping company can pick it back up? Do you all see where we are coming from here? It was already very hard for us to compete on the Mainland as witnessed by the fact that only one team outside Hawaii came here last year. It’s not possible for us to participate in a “drive-up” regional like the test sites in Michigan. Without some major help this could be the end for us! I’m worried about our Hawaii regional too. We have to ship from my Island to Oahu, unless someone has a spare submarine we can use. Our fantastic Robotics Organizing Committee has told us they will help us this year. Hopefully they can find a place to store our crates and still allow easy access to them when we fly over? We’ll still need to rent a truck unless they can somehow get our stuff to the arena???
Where to ship the crate to (assuming we get an exemption?)
I’d assume it’d be wherever the crates were shipped before (some drayage site nearby), and they’d probably even get it to and from the venue if needed. Venue space for crates is probably still there at a lot of regionals that didn’t switch venues and previously had crates.
Who would unload a 400+ lb crate for us from the shippers? Move it and store it at your place? Let us open it up the day before competition? Come back late after the competition so we can re-pack it? Move it out so our shipping company can pick it back up?
Most of these would probably be taken care by the drayage company FIRST would have you send the robot to. Alternatively, I know some schools and businesses have forklifts that can unload crates, and storage space. You wouldn’t open it before competition if it was shipped to the venue, and you’d probably crate it before you left so the shipping company could pick it up there. You’d only run into problems if you didn’t have your paperwork in order.
Hopefully they can find a place to store our crates and still allow easy access to them when we fly over? We’ll still need to rent a truck unless they can somehow get our stuff to the arena???
Again, unless the Hawaii regional switched venues or has teams taking up space that previously was storage for crates, I don’t see why it would be changed from previous years.
I like your optimism but i was told there are no drayage contracts this year and we would have to find our own means of getting our robot to the event. I suppose we could pay for drayage although I can’t imagine what that will cost after adding shipping over the pacific and airfare for the team (there are no buses from Hawaii to the Mainland) to the costs. Glenn, how are you guys doing it? I see three other Hawaii teams registered for Portland, have they made arrangements for shipping?
Dale,
as of right now, we are not even sure how everything is going to be handled.
We are going to wait until Oct. 27 to see if we get into our second regional…either Portland or Salt Lake City during week 2 or 3 respectively.
The most important challenge for us is getting the robot back from Salt Lake City, if possible, in two day time back to HI for our regional.
Will it cost us a lot? Absolutely…
But as you have mentioned, the drayage issue is something we do not understand fully quite yet since every event is now a bag-tag.
Our team has decided that if we do one of the above regionals…it will only be a skeleton crew since we wont make any travel arrangements until its all sorted, for which I’m guessing late December.
By that time, the rates should be sky high.:ahh:
Houston during week 6 is guaranteed for us, as we have made payment as of this morning already. I’m not worried about logistics as FIRST has said two airbills will be provided. We plan on bringing the army there!
Just an anecdote for you…
In 2008 we had a pretty massive shipping mishap. Our first regional was Arizona in week 2, with our second competition being Boston in week 5 or 6 I believe. When we walked into the Arizona regional on Thursday and got to our pit, we were greeted by the event staff. For some reason, our team didn’t have a crate at the event. After much digging, it was discovered our crate was sitting in drayage back in Massachusetts.
We got in touch with drayage and FedEx and arranged for our crate to be overnighted to us in Arizona. Thanks to the efforts of several people we never got a chance to meet, our robot arrived the next day. We missed a ton of matches on Friday trying to get the robot ready to go, but eventually made the elims and lost in the semis.
Hawaii adds another degree of shipping difficulty for sure, but I thought you may find this story somewhat interesting.
-Brando