I understand that - but the battle becomes getting your district to be later in the schedule. In other words, not fighting to get your robot into a later regional or district (currently normal practice if you have the resources), but fighting with FIRST to change the competition schedule to get your regional or district moved to later weeks.
I know it wouldn’t be as easy or as cheap as FTC, but I don’t see why teams wouldn’t follow the behaviors that are shown because of the open build time in FTC. I would expect there would be teams building two robots: one for the early part of the season and one for the later part of the season in which they grab as many ideas as they can.
What I remember from FTC was the longest/most stressful build times were in the couple of days leading up to the tournament. With no bag and tag, I would expect most teams would work on their robot for pretty much as much time as they are allowed to in the last couple days before the tournament. Meaning the tournaments would effectively go from 2 or 3 long hour days to 7 to 9 long hour days in a row. I would not be surprised if a lot more kids and mentors get sick (or hurt) at tournaments due to that.
To your 1st point, I was against that and did not participate as it was more commitment for off season than I was willing to put in. IT was really just 2 people working tirelessly to do it as well. Wave also no longer has the sponsor resource to be able to do something like that any more and part of the reason is because of that IRI robot.
As for your 2nd point you just pointed out the reason why B&T doesn’t stop teams from changing their robot. Properly planned designs with in the current 30 lb withholding allowance can completely change a robot. We’re not teaching our kids real engineering, we’re teaching them how to game the system. I’ve never had a hard deadline where I’m not allowed to touch my project until we show it to the customer. It makes 0 sense to have it and FRC is the only competition I know of that does it. as Mike said FIRST is doing itself in its customers a disservice by continuing to have B&T.
with the removal of B&T I might choose an earlier comp to take advantage of those who don’t stick to the current 6 week frame… I don’t see a fight for later competitions being a thing, stick time and out of bag time are the advantages that Districts have; its not going to late season events.
Mind if I extend that logic to bumpers? I don’t think we need those, got along fine without 'em for a long time!
The difference between those events and FRC is (other than size) that they’ve never had a stop build, and iteration is expected event-to-event. FRC’s stop-build comes from the days when the robots had to be shipped to the events in crates, and in order to ensure fair play between teams at different events all the robots had to be loaded up at the same time. (Although the West Coast got an extra 6 hours due to it being LOCAL time…)
Pre-crating… I want to say that it was BYOR at all events, without the bag. I’d have to look that up or ask someone who’s been around a while.
After crates became the norm and teams started playing 2 and 3 events regularly, FIRST started introducing “levelers” to allow teams who didn’t have an event to do work. FIX-IT windows (in the '05-'08 or later timeframes) allowed teams to build parts. Then the Withholding allowance came in–stuff you could bring in. Then there was a big snowstorm and Withholding was boosted to half the weight of the robot for that year…and cut back the next year.
It will be… interesting to see what happens as far as B&T this year. I’d be hoping for a limited opening time per week, for one year, and unlimited after that.
I’d be pleased if the next few years played out like this.
-Mike
Try working in Medical Devices 
You do development, hit your deadline, and then your product freezes for 6 months while the FDA looks at it. And then you go show it to the customer… and you can’t make changes without taking it back to the FDA, so you aren’t exactly updating the production line on the fly!
I’m definitely for getting rid of the bag but I did used to think that there would be heavy design convergence by the time champs came along. I still think there will but it already happens with the bag so it’s not really a big deal. There is still plenty of variance of robots anyways and looking at other college level year round competitions, there is still plenty of variety in designs, software, and mechanisms. For the Robosub competition, it is basically the same game every year for the last ~20 years and there are still large variances in robot design and software with new ideas and innovations being developed every year. Some teams learn from each other and use other team’s designs for future years but the rest of the robot is generally different enough in other areas.
Respectfully, this is just totally wrong. While we might not frequently see large design convergences, we definitely will see more. Currently only super high resource teams are capable of pulling off these changes, but there are many, many examples of design convergence already. It’s been happening for a loooong time. 2011 minibots, 2012 stingers, 2013 shooters, 2013 wedge hangers, 2013 pneumatic hangers, 2015 intake geometry, 2015 ramps, 2015 can grabbers, 2017 climbers, 2017 ground gear pickups. Removing bag and tag opens up things like this to mid resource teams, and complete robot redesigns to high resource teams.
We are already seeing pretty major redesigns of robots throughout the season (see 558 in 2017) where virtually everything about the robot is completely changed.
We also see that rookie Chinese team trying to copy 118 in 2016. It can and will happen. (with significant effort)
That being said, I don’t think design convergence is inherently bad. Innovation can still occur with a high percentage of design convergence, and cool things can, and will still happen. That being said i’m not really a fan of VEX’s current (and further trending) tendencies for everyone to just give up on their own designs and just copy whoever is considered the “best” at the time. This does have benefits however, eg increased competitiveness, and more inspiration since teams feel like they accomplished something great. I’m just not a fan of the teams that seem to sit around and never innovate year after year. Obviously FRC wouldn’t reach that level of complacency however, at least for a while.
I’m pretty confident we would see some full robot robot copies to varying success. Not sure to what extent, but they definitely won’t be super common, and obviously not every team can pull it off.
This is a really good point. I actually think the biggest change we would see is a lot more competent auto modes.
I don’t think Bag and Tag will end because the selling point of “These kids build this whole robot in just 6 weeks!” is just too well liked by FIRST leadership. The statement is obviously not true for most teams, but getting rid of Bag and Tag would make it a completely disingenuous pitch.
Not sure if this is even really a FIRST pitch, and more of a FIRST team pitch to sponsors. While this definitely is impressive to people, i’m not 100% sure how effective it is.
This occurs to a large degree with FLL where the timeline is more compact than VEX, and is somewhat similar to FRC’s 6 week schedule (though slightly larger) FLL mostly runs from November-December for local comps. It doesn’t really happen with VEX since there are events almost year round.
However we already have many teams that have a distaste for week one events, so it might not change much.
I worked for a medical devices company and I can tell you that the current practices are atrocious and outdated. Hospitals currently deploy devices that run Windows NT and Windows 2000 and are relied upon to keep patients alive and drugs delivered on schedule.
Video of an interesting talk about the vulnerabilities these devices have here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZusL2BY6_XU
This becomes more relevant as devices become “smarter” and more reliant on software and more of them become ‘connected’.
In fact, the 21st Century Cures Act at one point had language to help with some of these development pains and I believe it passed with some of that language still in tact for “research” purposes but I don’t know that for certain.
I think it’s futile to argue that any type of engineering isn’t an iterative process and that “bag and tag” should be kept because “that’s how the real world works” - it’s a load of hooey.
As for teams signing up for later events? Why does anyone believe this? The data supports the opposite and teams are more likely to sign up for less competitive and earlier events. Just look at the scores and how they increase over time throughout the competition season. TBA has the data.
The sooner you compete, the sooner you get a boatload of data as to how your first iteration works and what you need to change to be competitive this season. Why anyone would want to delay the start of this process is completely beyond me.
What I have seen in FTC in MN is that the first event tends to be pretty stacked. After that it drops off and ramps up during the season. The mean scores (without penalties) last year were:
Week 1 = 55.2
Week 2 = 41.0
Week 3 = 43.4
Week 4 = 47.6
<a few weeks for Christmas break>
Week 5 = 56.5
Week 6 = 54.0
State = 93.7
That’s been true for FTC in MN since introducing qualifying events 3 years ago.
While there may be, I repeat may be, competitive reasons to ditch the bag and tag rite, no one is talking about the human factor.
For my experience and discussions with other mentors, teams already meet 6-7 days a week, averaging more than 25 hours a week, during their build. Some teams push the 40 hour a week envelope. This is on top of school, homework, family, and jobs.
Removing the Stop Build constraint is going to burnout lot of mentors and students. Every year for the last 17, I’ve seen team members, including mentors, start to show the stress of all those hours. It isn’t pretty. People need their down time.
I would not describe the way a medical device goes through the design process this way at all. I wouldn’t use the term “freezing”, I wouldn’t say “6 months” and I wouldn’t say FDA actually “looks” at the physical product. UL/CSA and the EMI dudes require “production representative” I would say that the bag doesn’t resemble anything I done in a Medical RND environment.
It does for me, 10 years of experience, major releases were 6 months at the FDA, minor releases might get by with 3 months, and we had to go back to the FDA before we could implement any change at all - which means your product is frozen from the time you submit until the time the FDA approves the next iteration. Now working in a non-regulated environment, it is a completely different experience. I can release a build, get customer feedback, and release a new build all in the same day if I want. You can’t do that when dealing with medical devices.
I’d be curious to know when this “down time” is currently in the schedule after the robot is bagged?
Maybe don’t meet 6-7 days a week? 
Forgive me, but why would this be worse after the removal of the stop build date. It seems to me that that 6 week build season itself is what breeds these sort of high intensity sessions in the first place. If you know you will have more time to build, you can usually better plan accordingly, and you won’t necessarily have the same crunch on you that the stop build day can bring.
I draw a comparison to that of which we use in the software company that I work for. Our development team has to occasionally take part in what are known in our office as “death marches” or “super sprints” where we have to spend 50-60 hours a week in the office trying to push a new revision of a product. Is this our normal schedule…no and believe me more people get burnt out during these high intensity sprints than they do under normal work schedules.
There are no requirements from FIRST on how often and how long teams are to meet to build their robots or do any other activity teams are known to do.
If people have problem with burnout or over extending themselves those are personal problems and keeping or getting rid of B&T isn’t going to fix them. Hurting the many to “benefit” the few is not the smart way to run anything.
I fail to see how removing the Stop Build date would hurt the “many”. It has been in place for 25 years.
Ok. FRC World, How often and for how many hours a week do you meet during build?
I can’t speak for other teams but we typically drop back to 2-3 times a week.
Yes, the 6 week build causes the stress I mentioned. However in my opinion extending or eliminating the Stop Build will not alleviate the stress. The old anachronism, “Work will expand to fill the time allotted”, applies here.