My robotics team is considering bringing our robot as carry-on luggage for an international regional, since shipping it takes too long. Does anyone have experience with this? Any advice, suggestions, or things we should consider would be greatly appreciated!
I believe 2910 does or at least has taken their bot on planes. I’d imagine the biggest problem is getting it small enough to fit as a carry on.
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Paging @Jimmyy @Flightbudz who flew with their robot to Chezy Champs in September 2024.
4481 posted this video about how they fly with their robot. I think they also had a writeup somewhere on their build blog, but I am not sure.
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We separate our robot into two parts: the base and top structure, and put them into two flight cases. Our tools and spares are put in tool boxes, pelicans, and since every teammate has two checked in, one is for team use. Drill batterires are put in carry-ons of team members.
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it was disassembled to go on the plane in 7 cases, then reassembled at the hotel
honestly, this was very stressful. Our robot was not designed to come apart like that, iirc 4481 designs their robot to be modular and fit in cases
reassembly:
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Smart idea! What was it like going through TSA with that though? 
they were in checked bags (with labels on boxes and such), which I would recommend to pack a lot of foam / packing materials because they are ROUGH with bags, I have a video of them throwing our 70lb swerve base onto the conveyor
also had to make sure the word “Shooter” was out of everyones vocabulary before we got into the airport, for a short while it was called the “outtake” 
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Do you know how much time it took you guys to reassemble the robot? Also how did you ship the batteries?
yeah probably smart to call it an outtake… I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve had to explain to a teacher or someone, that I’m talking about a robot mechanism when I say “shooter”
I think my heart would stop if I saw them do that to our swerve base though. I’ll definitely remember to throw as many “Fragile” and “This Side Up” stickers on our bags if we ever do this. Have you ever had problems with things getting damaged, or has the padding always protected everything well enough?
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Thanks for the video it helped alot!
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for chezy champswe ordered new batteries and had them delivered to either 581’s or 254’s facility, my memory escapes me currently
it took about 1.5 hrs to 2hrs to reassemble our robot, granted we had an incredibly simple robot
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everything was pretty much fine, except for the moisture in under the plane, it caused the non powder coated intake spares to rust a little bit
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