were there robot related injuries on your team?

[Will Hanashiro]

well of course working on heavy machinery can be dangerous... but has anybody on your team been hurt durring the years of working on the robot?

on our team 322, one serious, and one seriously funny injury occured this past year... the first was when our driver was opperating on a surface grinder to grind a washer down to fit in our transmission. well he finished grinding, but forgot to turn the machine off when dusting the table off. his middle finger went through the surface grinder and as a result, his nail was ripped off the finger, and he was rushed to the hospital. later that same day he returned to finish working on the transmission. his finger nail is now almost completely grown back.

our second (funny) injury occured when we were trying to glue a tread to one of our wheels. we used epoxy, and to make sure it was on tight, we used a rubber surgical tube to hold it down. after wrapping the tube around the wheel about 20 times, we were trying to tie a knot in it, when it slipped and began spinning off the wheel. all we heard was slap slap slap, and our engineer was rolling over on the ground. it turns out that as it was spinning off the wheel, the tube hit him in the nuts. imagine getting hit in the nuts like 20 times in one second :D

[kristen]

One of the alumni on our team cut himself on the band saw this year... he didn't attract any attention to himself or anything.

.. I'd SLIGHTLY hurt myself and cause a scene... maybe I'm just dramatic like that.

[sanddrag]

Our robot attacked our programmer autonomously.

[Gadget470]

we almost had a serious injury..

somehow.. our programming was screwed up and "joy_1_trigger" would run autonomous mode. (we had a special button elsewhere to run auto code for testing purposes).

Well, we are sitting at glr, getting code set, testing wings.. people are walking by.. we drop one wing.. then attempt to do the other one.. well the downed wing snaps up, and the robot takes off. I was holding onto it to rest my hand .. then I was holding on for dear life. I was holding back our quite powerful bot (we shoved 25 around like nobody's business at nationals [practice rounds]). someone else, I think one of the engineers, jumps up to help out. While all this was going on, someone was walking by and nearly got sandwhiched between the bot and the cement wall. Whoever was helping me, reached in and hit the breaker button (turn off bot). After we realised what just happened, [auto code ran], we realised how lucky we were. The next part of the code was to back up. Which would have done very serious damage to me, my helper, the computer, table.. and a few other things/people.

Later on, a similar problem occured but the tether cable popped out. The bot was about 4" from a person when she stopped.


Last year, with 247, we had the robot doing a "safety glasses check" on one of the engineers. Could have stabbed out his eye.

Just about every day I worked on the bot I got some kind of cut.

Nearly had my throught cut (I did, but not too deep). Picture: here (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pictures.php?s=&action=single&picid=3547&direction=DESC&sort=date&perrow=3&trows=4&quiet=verbose). Was worse than it seems. That's after i cleaned up the blood.

[angier314]

Last year we were fixing up our robot from the last season. We had two claws (one one each side of the robot) that were just resting on each other up right. we were all standing around the robot. One team member decided to lift one side of the robot and the claws fell and hit one of our freshman full force in the head. We thought he was going to black out because it hit him so hard.
Another time i was drilling a small piece of metal, the drill slippe, and i ended up drilling my finger nail. It was cracked, and turned black and blue.
My friend frank was helping me put rivets on the chain because they broke off. He sat one of them in the hole and the chain slid off the table. He went for it and that rivet went into his skin. It looked like it went in deep when he was pulling it out.
.:ahh: :yikes:

[D.J. Fluck]

Well the few I can think of off hand.


St Louis Regional
They were testing our wings, and whoever was operating lowered the wrong wing and clunked me on the head when I was talking to a judge.

Pittsburgh Regional
Our head teacher, Mr Railey was drilling a hole for a new lexan plate for our drive victors to be mounted on and he slipped and drilled right into his thumb. Blood shot all over the place, even on another engineers face :p

Midwest Regional
I was drilling a hole and I slipped and drilled into my thumb on Friday morning too. Kinda hurt, but it wasn't as bad as Mr Railey's thumb hole. Hey you can still see the outline of the scar too...its pretty cool :p

[Yan Wang]

A person who was supposed to be holding one of our robot's shuttles/arms did not hold it long and it fell upon my head when I was attaching a gripper/orienter device that I had just finished to the robot... hit me square on the forehead, I feel down, and it started bleeding a little. Kinda hurt a lot...

[Matt_Kaplan1902]

NO SERIOUS INJURIES FOR 108. A FUNNY ONE WAS WHEN ONE OF MECH ENGINEERS CUT CUT HIMSELF AND WIPED IT OFF ON A RAG THAT WAS DRIPPING WITH OIL (I DONT THINK HE REALIZED.)

AT UCF WE WERE TESTING OUR WINGS AND ONE KID GOT KNOCKED RIGHT IN THE HEAD. ALSO AT UCF I ALMOST REAPEADTLY GOT KNOCKED AROUND BY TEAM 147's FLY-UP WINGS (SIMILAR DESIGN TO TEAM 71 BUT WIDER). THAT ABOUT IT.

P.S. DID ANYONE GET LOCKED INTO THEIR TEAM'S CRATE CAUSE I DID.

[Yan Wang]

You know, a week back, I had a virus that disabled my ability to type and that sucked... took a while to fix. Be glad you have the ability to be "outspoken" with a caps lock key. :)

[Matt Krass]

Well our auto code pulled a random timer glitch and tried to run over our senior programmer, but I don't think he was hurt.

[Andy Grady]

I actually think my record still holds strong...

Only human player to miss a match due to injury.

1996, Hexagon Havoc, between rounds I was fixing a plastic chain on our robot and put a screwdriver across my finger, resulting in mass bleeding. Missed our next round. People will tell you that could only happen to me!

-Andy Grady

[Beth Sweet]

this wasnt really during the season, so i dont know if it counts, but we had the robot at my sisters grad party, and i had never driven it before. one of the guys who basically was one of our main builders was setting it up for me to drive, and when he plugged it in i accidently knocked him over w/ it!! hm hm hm.....

[Amanda Aldridge]

We had a running list on the blackboard....it became kind of a running joke. There is a whole section on it in our team video this year. Including a very funny part with the robot whacking Mr. Noble and Jim, our mechanic. Repeatedly. :D

[Pin Man]

Our robot's arm almost took out our lead mentor from J&J...

[geo]

One of our team member almost lost his finger on a grander.

[Koci]

When I was programming the auto, I was doing dead reckoning in bits and pieces, and when it finally worked to the end, i set it to do the full course, forgetting, of course, this meant continuing up the ramp forever. So after starting it, I went over there expecting it to stop, but it didn't, and ran me over, leaving a large gash on my forehead. The good news is, I stopped the robot.

[DougHogg]

1) One of our students was using a table saw to cut off a strip of UHMW (Ultra High Molecular Weight) plastic that we use as a bearing for our arm. (The arm rotates in a hole in the plastic which is very slippery stuff.) Apparently the plastic got hot and stuck to the blade, and somehow it pulled his finger over to the blade. He had a lot of stitches in that finger. The plastic is great stuff, but be careful if you are ever cutting it. A stick with a notch to hold down and push the plastic (push stick) would have prevented the accident.

2) Our telescoping arm this year has two motors. One raises the arm and the other rotates it.

http://doughogg.f2o.org/images2003/Team980ArmBash.jpg

One day during testing, the arm came up but didn't rotate. The engineer who designed the arm, came forward to see what the problem was. At that point, the arm suddenly swung and hit him right between the eyes on the bridge of his nose. He was hurting for several days. Apparently there was a loose wire which became "un-loose". (After this event, there were some ideas of changing the robot's name from "Yoda" to something like "Franky", short for "Frankenstein II".)

[Kel D]

at the philly regional, our driver was working on something on the robot, i dont know what exactly, and her hand was under the robot. well, another girl pushed the button for the suction cups to go down and they came down on our drivers finger and smashed it. it was pretty bad. it swelled up, it was terrible and all this before the elimination rounds. but she still got through it, she's a trooper!! after that, it got infected and she had to go on medication for it, but it cleared up for nationals, so we were happy.

[Will Hanashiro]

it may not be an injury, and it may not be robot related, but it is related to FIRST... but i feel that Pres. Bush falling off the segway is the FUNNIEST "injury" to date.

[Matt_Kaplan1902]

Originally posted by Will Hanashiro
it may not be an injury, and it may not be robot related, but it is related to FIRST... but i feel that Pres. Bush falling off the segway is the FUNNIEST "injury" to date.


that was hilarous. i belive it was tues night on the late show they had the top ten things going through bush's mind as he fell off the segway.

[Matt_Kaplan1902]

I FOUND THE LIST HERE IT IS:

Top Ten Things Going Through President Bush's Mind At This Moment (Falling off a Segway)


10. "$@#$@#$@#$@# you, Al-Qaeda!"

9. "I'm sure Thomas Jefferson fell off his Segway every now and then"

8. "It looked so easy on 'The Jetsons'"

7. "I misunderestimated my center of gravity"

6. "Thank God no one got a picture of this"

5. "Only 4 days 'til Hulk! Only 4 days 'til Hulk! Only 4 days 'til Hulk!"

4. "$@#$@#$@#$@#, this thing would give Cheney, like, 3 heart attacks"

3. "Congratulations, Segway -- you just joined the axis of evil"

2. "To distract everyone, bomb the hell out of Syria"

1. "AHHHHHHHHH!"

[JVN]

Originally posted by DougHogg
One day during testing, the arm came up but didn't rotate. The engineer who designed the arm, came forward to see what the problem was. At that point, the arm suddenly swung and hit him right between the eyes on the bridge of his nose. He was hurting for several days.

We were standing around the practice field on evening in Houston, and a "flailer" team (not 980, 234, 71, or 148... I don't remember who it was) was setting up their bot for practice. I guess they had their autonomous mode set backwards because instead of knocking down the wall... the arm swung out into the crowd of bystanders. After things calmed down, 3 Members of 229 were down on the ground, a 4th was standing there white as a ghost, muttering something about feeling something brush against his nose.... :yikes:

[AJ Quick]

I got an autonomous hit to the shins.

[Kel D]

Originally posted by JVN
We were standing around the practice field on evening in Houston, and a "flailer" team (not 980, 234, 71, or 148... I don't remember who it was) was setting up their bot for practice. I guess they had their autonomous mode set backwards because instead of knocking down the wall... the arm swung out into the crowd of bystanders. After things calmed down, 3 Members of 229 were down on the ground, a 4th was standing there white as a ghost, muttering something about feeling something brush against his nose.... :yikes:

could you be speaking of 433? we had a very similar inccident at nationals that happened more than once i think.

[Greg Perkins]

this year, we share a build area with team 166.
well they had a prototype drive system set up for their auto and gearboxs. our robot, 151 was lying in pieces on the opposite end of our makeshift playing field. well 5 minutes before, 166 setup thier robot backwards and it drove into our driver. well, to say the least...he wasnt very happy...anyway..
well they set it up in the correct position for another try at it, and somehow, the code got reversed, so hte bot drove striaight backwards. so we are working quietly on the bot, when WHAM!!
the robot hits tyler again, and he grabs the robot and flips it over, thinking that it will go the other way...
well their auto mode at that point did the opposite thing IT CAME BACK AT TYLER AGAIN, its like it wouldnt stop! classic


i didnt hurt myself this year, amazingly!!

Greg

[tatsak42]

Deburring tools are sharp, 2 one inch cuts that bled pretty badly for a cut.
A smashed finger by not being ready for a chuck to come out of a mill.
On one of the ramps at nats, I tried to see how fast the cart would start going if I let it roll on one of the down ramps... I forgot I was in front of it, so therefore the lexan on the front gave me a 3 inch cut that I actually did not realize had bled until someone else pointed it out. Scar remains.
I also was the human player.. Put down two bins down fairly hard. Misjudged distance to ground. Head going down, bin bouncing up. Head pushing bin back down to the other bin. Bin not going any farther. $lip{condition}="cut and bleeding";
Surprisingly, the arm for our robot, that has a very major pinch/cut off finger joint did not claim any casualties.

[Alexander McGee]

Well, we had a few injuries this year. I have to say, one of them was me.

To start with my injury, I would like to thank the transmissions that we used. Well, i was assembelling one of them, and i hooked it up to a battery pack we have (basically a bosch drill housing with wires out the end, that we use to provide power for testing purposes). And, i was running one of the motors to see if i had it assemblled correctlly. I was also holding it in my hand while i did this. This would be the mistake. One of the gears slipped out, and caused a chain to swing freely. Well, my thumb got caught in that, and i lost the top of my thumb. Everything grew back by the time that i needed to use it. Took about a month.

A more serious injury happened to a guy named Mac. While we were testing our arms at Arizona, he was supporting them. One of our advisors was driving the robot. Anyways, Mac got his fingers caught between stages one and two of our arms. If you haven't seen out robot, theyres not a lot of clearance between those stages, an theyres a lot of power driving them. Mac got his hand crushed pretty bad. His fingers were black and blue for quite a while.

The other serious on that i can think of was this guy on our team named Joe. Everyone remember that really huge loading ramp at nats? And, if you've ever walked through our pits, you've seen our 1/2 ton snapon toolbox. Well, joe procedded to push this up that ramp. Needless to say, he threw out his back, and nearly killed himself and others when he lost controll. He spent the night in the Arizona State Hospital, and was released later the next day.

We all need to remember to be careful at these competitions. Danger lies in the most unexpected (and comical) places.

I've got a picutre of it here. Good Job Joe.

[Daniel Brim]

Originally posted by sigmakid108
P.S. DID ANYONE GET LOCKED INTO THEIR TEAM'S CRATE CAUSE I DID.
Yes, I indeed did, but it was on purpose. I was fixing the door so we could bolt it shut, and I was using the centerpunch to mark something (I don't remember what). We also locked Marygrace in there and forgot.

Now, on to our injuries. Only two that I can think of. First, a freshman was messing around with the grinder (grinding a tiny piece of aluminum) and ground the front of his left index finger off. At least this year (was a freshman) I knew common sense. The only other one (not totally robot related) is that a senior popped out her knee at the Arizona team social.

[sanddrag]

Originally posted by DanielBCR
First, a freshman was messing around with the grinder (grinding a tiny piece of aluminum) and ground the front of his left index finger off. Ouch. But, it kind of makes sense because you're not supposed to grind aluminum anyhow.

[Beth Sweet]

Originally posted by sigmakid108

P.S. DID ANYONE GET LOCKED INTO THEIR TEAM'S CRATE CAUSE I DID. [/B]
Yeah, but it wasn't exactly accidental. It did on the other hand, make some very interesting film... We locked Jon in the crate while he was cleaning it. It was rather amusing.

[Rob Colatutto]

In Houston while we were fixing our robot after a match, i was changing the battery which just happens to be under the arm, so we raised it all the way up while i changed the battery... after i put the new battery in someone bumped the table and our nice 25 pound arm came down on my head. Put me on the floor for a few minutes...

[Kristina]

Originally posted by DougHogg
2) Our telescoping arm this year has two motors. One raises the arm and the other rotates it.



Hmmm...I remember ducking from that arm 2x at the Chatsworth scrimmage when I was reff'ing with Sean. Sheesh, I thought I could avoid potential robotics related injuries by not being around during build season but apparently not because now I have other teams after me. I'm just kidding, no hard feelings.

[Specialagentjim]

Ahh! The arm robots! lol. Practice field at nationals, the one near robot registration and safety check; I'm standing over there, about 15-20 minutes before pits close, with a half-autonmous robot. We've got all the code for it done and we're setting the values (Run motor at x speed for y cycles). 108, along with about 10-15 other teams there, are all getting auton mode finished. Everyone is being about as arrogant as can be, including myself (regrettably), and total chaos has ensued there. For the most part, teams usually give a loud warning before running their robot, usually in the form of "GET OUT THE WAY, We're gonna run it!". Well, we really need our code working, so as I'm holder-of-the-almighty-tether for the moment, im standing behind the robot checking for that weird nosie it just made. Have I painted the picture of total chaotic environment yet? Heh, next I hear the team behind me say "Okay, we're gonna run it, look out". The thoughts in my head are, "alright...im not near the ramp, go ahead and run it, not anywhere near me". I don't however, realize that its an arm bot. They warn me about 2 more times, say "oh well, run it!". That arm comes flying at me, as I finally realize why they warned me. I duck with about a fraction of a second to spare, JUST avoiding it. lol, I was freaked for a second, laughed for another 2, then went back to our robot.

Anyone remember almost knocking out a 108 member? We've got white shirts with a dark blue top of the shirt, with a big pantehr on the front. At the time, someone from their team got a picture of it and offered to send it to me. I sorta was distracted by our robot, and didnt get his e-mail addy. Anyone have that pic? I'd love to have it :D


Injury-wise: 108 always has em, but we're also known for our "narrowly escaping" maneuvars. Now, we're a technology program at our high school, so none of us are in the greatest of shape. Now, imagine us, moving at speeds beyond we've ever moved, to avoid things flying at us. We've caught wings, drive trains, and various other things juss in the nick of time.


One more to add to this horrendously long post. Our robot, on start up, had a glitch for a while. This glitch would cause the robot on every start up to run the first cycle of autonmous (A glitch no one understood, but seemed to just "disappear" one day). Our mechanical engineer would, of course, be standing in front of the robot watching the drivetrain EVERY time we started it. Everytime it would jump foreward about 2-4 inchs and just about take him out....and evertime he'd look up and say "WHO DID THAT??". We'd then explain, for the nth time, that it was auton, and not us.

hehe...If I think of more, I'll post them..If I'm not banned by everyone for the length of this post. Yeahhh...

[Gena B.]

Some of the stories on this post are cracking me up!

I thought of a really good one dealing with the autonomous mode for our team this year.
We had a basic program that we were testing out at our playing field. A first-year volunteer on our team, fondly known as Uncle Gary, was helping some students... We connected the tether to the robot to load the program onto it, but when it was done, instead of us having time to unplug it, there was a slight glitch and it started moving as soon as it had the program. The lap top was still connected and was resting on top of one of the totes. But the program didn't work accurately at the time, and the robot started spinning around in circles. :yikes: Hahaha- I can still see Uncle Gary grabbing the computer and chasing the robot around while everyone else scattered! Finally someone was able to turn the robot off and no one was hurt.

I don't remember any accidents happening where someone really got injured, we just have some pretty funny stories.

I have one more for you...;)
Last year, me and my friend were working on our robot's ball pick-up, and directly above us on a flight of stairs one of our engineers was standing talking to another adult. He wasn't paying attention and he accidentally dropped an open water bottle on our heads! It was actually really funny, because at first we didn't notice where it came from.. The other adults kept joking around with him about the students having to wear hard hats to work under him! Oh, good times! :D

[Willum]

Well, we had a constant fear of what was essentially a guillotine on this year's robot. then there were the arms that swung too fast and almost beheaded our electrical female. Of course the autonomous code managed to assault everything within reach.

[Ashley Weed]

I deffinately wasn't fond of making the dumb corner protectors to attach the lexan to this year. We used a really crappy sheet metal, and well.. in the process.. I was just carrying it once and walked over to the table to realize my thumb was gushing with blood.

Last year was even more dangerous... our goal grabber arms were pneumatic.... and well... there was a LOT of force behind them. I accidently rotated and closed an arm on my leg at a demo.. and well.. there is still noticeable damage when I'm playing soccer :)

[Ryan Foley]

yeah, so apparently with our control system:
when you disable the bot when the wings are out, it brings the wings back in (piston powered wings to be specific). Then, when you enable it again (assuming power hasnt been cut off to either the OI or RC) the wings pop out again.

I kinda forgot about that minor detail.

got nailed right below the knee with one of the wings.

And I know its not robot related, but its still funny.
One of my fellow team members was trying to knock a welded piece off of our robot using a rubber mallet. He kind of let go at the end of his swing and the rubber hammer flew 20ft and hit me about an inch from my heart.

I ran when he said "what about a sledge hammer?"

[R Bohannan]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Greg Perkins
[B]this year, we share a build area with team 166.
well they had a prototype drive system set up for their auto and gearboxs. our robot, 151 was lying in pieces on the opposite end of our makeshift playing field. well 5 minutes before, 166 setup thier robot backwards and it drove into our driver. well, to say the least...he wasnt very happy...anyway..
well they set it up in the correct position for another try at it, and somehow, the code got reversed, so hte bot drove striaight backwards. so we are working quietly on the bot, when WHAM!!
the robot hits tyler again, and he grabs the robot and flips it over, thinking that it will go the other way...
well their auto mode at that point did the opposite thing IT CAME BACK AT TYLER AGAIN, its like it wouldnt stop! classic


Greg - the amazing thing about your story is that the robot wasn't in autonomous mode - I was driving it......:p

[Veselin Kolev]

Here's a way to get plenty of robot injuries...
If you used sensors to locate and destroy stacks and did it fairly well...
You can have games of seek and destroy. Buy some of that reflective tape and stick it onto people's ankles...
And if you have a fast robot, and if they don't realize they have the tape on, you can get some good laughs. Just don't do this without an intelligent person at the kill switch. Don't want anybody to get hurt.

As for the injuries, once while cutting some bars with a radial arm saw, the brushes started sparking like crazy and burnt me.
At Silicon Valley regionals, I was drilling mounting holes in our plexi-glass side panels and the drill got my finger, and it was really deep, like a 1/4 inch deep. It didn't bleed too much though.
And our pneumatics are sort-of spontaneous, and our extending elevator got a guy working on it pretty hard.

[Aignam]

Not quite robot related, but while building a practice ramp after the release of the Stack Attack game, I was nailing something in place and my foot hit an easel that had been propped up against the wall. The easel started falling towards a student who had been nailing another piece in, someone yelled heads up, so naturally, the student turned his head upwards, and got scraped right along the bridge of the nose with the top of the easel. It was all fun and games afterwards, but it left a mark for a month or so that I had to deal with everytime I saw the particular student.

[josh_johnson]

I think total over the season I got hit with the wings about a dozen times. However, the funniest of these was before we slowed down the speed of the wings and we were testing out our autonomous code. I was trying to get the robot to correctly follow the line and forgot about the part of the code that caused the wings to drop. One of the wings, of course, hit me right on top of the head. The person driving at the time frantically tried to raise the wings, but hit the button once too many times and smacked me in the head again after raising them. Then after raising the wings, he unplugged the OI causing the wings to revert to the default state which at that time was down. So I managed to get smacked in the head by the wings three times in about 5 seconds.

[Andrew S]

We were testing the auton mode on our robot out in the parking lot of the school, and we had the robot on tether. My teammate was holding the cord too close to the robot and when the robot went to turn he pulled it a bit, just enough to have the robot headed straight for him. Needless to say he went running and the robot got the best of him :rolleyes:

[Joe Matt]

My favorite injury to a team mate happened during a strategy session.

It involved a box, a freshman, and a broken nose.

[Ryan Dognaux]

I got an injury at IRI... but it really wasn't robot related. Somehow during the HP competition I cut my hand on a piece of container... funny, you'd think I'd get injured by the robot :confused:

[Tytus Gerrish]

the bolt that did this whizzed over the heads of 4 engineers, Was this tytus's Fault?.... YES!, Did he learn his lesson?... (Do not Launch Steel bolts out of Pnewmatic Projectile weapons inside the shop) YES!

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/pics/bin/1046884645crack.jpg

[KenWittlief]

when I was on the Xcats in '02, our bot was designed with a spinning wheel that shot the soccer balls up to 20 feet through the air into the goal.

We had a prototype of it set up on a bench, and we setup a couple PVC pipes as a feeder - we could put 10 soccerballs on the feeder, then let them go, and they would roll down and the spinning wheel would shoot them into the goal at 1/2 second intervals - it was really cool to see.

so we were trying to perfect this shooter, and had rigged a tach to the wheel that we monitored with an oscilloscope. It took two people to hold the tach against the spinning wheel, operate the scope, and load a ball onto the feeder so we could see how much the wheel slowed down as it fired each ball.

one time I was doing this with another engineer, who didnt know how to use the scope. The wheel was spinning, and I was holding the tack against it with one hand, and holding the ball on the feeder back with the other, and the engineer asked me how to trigger the scope?

Push the single button
which one?
the single sweep button
this one?

No [I reach for scope with one hand while leaning over the shooter]... this BAM!

It took me a second to realize I had let the ball go, and shot myself in the face with a soccerball point blank. It took me a few more seconds to figure out if had shot my eye out, and where my glasses were.

no permanate injury, but I have no doubt that robot tried to kill me!

[Soukup]

myself and the driver had millions of cuts and scrapes from lifting the robot. At West Michigan I remember looking at my arms on Friday and seeing bloody little cuts all over my arm.

oh..... and every member of the animation team electrocuted themself at some point

[CJ Graham]

No injuries on my team... however, we did injure a few robots due to our wedge and powerful drive trains. Many robots tried to ram ours and... well... they didn't succeed.

Get ready...Your Candy @$$ is Next! -The Rock

Yeah.. that was us.:D

[Marygrace]

LOL, a good friend of mine grinded his finger. It wasn't that serious, just made him pay attention to what he was doing a little more. Also, i have little scars everywhere from welding. I would get frustrated, along with my welding mentor, and we would both get careless. A burn here, burn there. We would forget which corner we had just welded and would grab it. Good Times. :cool: It was really frustrating then, but now that i look back on it, LOL, we were major losers. :D

[Ryan Albright]

recently at the robot rodeo, are chain fell off one of are wheels and i was trying to put a new master link on it. Well all was going good till i was putting the pin on and my hand slipped drving the pin into my thumb so of course i yelled soem choice words and it didnt stop bleeding for awhile and i decided to get stitches when i got home (that was about 4 hours latta) waiting that long and not getting it cleaned enough caused the finger to get infected which in the cut they put 2 stiches so i had to go back to the hospital and they made another cut to drain the puss out of my finger :rolleyes: word of the wise if it looks like it needs stiches, go get them

[KenWittlief]

one thing Ive learned over the years, whenever you work on something mechanical

you are not 'done' until you have smeared some blood on it.

for example, if you are working on your car, and you dont bash a knuckle or cut yourself, dont put the tools away when you think you are done, cause the car wont be right

and when you do cut yourself, make sure you get some blood on the machine, or it wont count, and you will have to do it all over later. :v)

[team222badbrad]

Yes we have had our cuts and scrapes here and their thankfully no serious injuries!

If anything has serious injuries it would have to be our robot.
Did you know you can dent lexan?
Did you know you can puncture lexan?
Did you know you can paint lexan by scrubing up with MOE?

Did you know our robot was dropped by a shipping company?
This drop would have to be the most damaging thing that our 2003 bot has seen. This bent our frame and broke a whole bunch of stuff including the operater interface controls.

I guess you can say our robot has almost been through Battle Bots. This is due to being in 4 FIRST competitions and 5 off-season events and it will be seeing its 6th off-season event this Saturday.

This will probably its retirement party....

[Elgin Clock]

Um... well I was almost beat up by the students for breaking the drill motor as soon as we got it this year?? Does that count??

It fell apart right in my hands.... I swear!!!

There were little gears all over the place!!

[Scott Duhaime]

Last year our robot bite me almost every time i worked on it. But the worst injury came when we were test auton mode we didn't quite have the code right and it took a bite out of the ramp! It took out a robot size chuck, but what does one expect when working with a hammerhead!

( I think it also gave someone a rug burn while pulling them across the carpet ):D

[Skabana159]

There was one really comical one for 159 that TatSak missed...

We were having a Colorado exhibition to promote new teams in order to get a regional for this year (success!). Anyways, we were having a little trouble with our drive code for some reason. Well, good ol' TatSak pushed the joystick, it accelerated perfectly with the stick, and failed to stop when he released the joystick. Well, at our somewhat rudimentary field, there were no barriers on the edge of the field. What we did have on the edge of the field was a cameraman from FOX NEWS! Well, I, with my most unpracticed football skills, gallantly tackled the beast and got the power switch, but not before suffering numerous gashes on my shins and fingers. One on my shin bled quite profusely, causing me to have to change socks...

[KenWittlief]

thats one advantage to having a two wheel drive powertrain

if the bot goes out of control, you can simply lift the drivewheels off the ground :^)

[Paul H]

Well, at the beginning of the season, we were role playing with people as robots. We wanted to see if throwing boxes would do anything for us. Problem is, we did not have the official boxes yet, so we used hard plastic crates...VERY hard! Well, the kid across the field from me threw it up and I heard PAUL LOOK OUT! I looked up and BAM! Right in the face. It hit at the bridge of my nose, but I didn't break anything.

The big one happened at the Cleveland Regional. Out arms have chain and sprockets to open them, and they open in Autonomous mode. Well, a girl had her hands in there and the Auto mode got switched on. It sucked her finger in between the chain and the sprocket. (Anyone there probably heard her scream) Thank goodness it was still loose, because if it were tightened, it would have taken her finger right off.

[DUCKIE]

Originally posted by team222badbrad
Did you know you can paint lexan by scrubing up with MOE?
I like to think of it as us "leaving our mark" on FIRST. If they can see after being blinded by all the lime-green that is.

As for injuries, I haven't had any serious ones.... yet...

-Nationals 2002- I was doing an "infamous" fasteners check on one of MOEHawks wings when the long mailing tube (8' or something close to) which was full of extra aluminum to repair the wings fell over and hit me right between my shoulder blades. It sure stunned me... and left quite the bruise too. Advil became my best friend for the rest of the competition.

-2003 Commonwealth Awards- Both MOE and the Lunatechs were lucky to be invited to this event at the Hotel Dupont, where Dean was recieving his award and doing press confrences. We had a need for some Duct Tape to hang something... so i dug out my roll (I AM known as Ducky for a reason) but realized that i had grabbed the roll which is impossible to rip by hand. No problem... I always have my multi-tool too... so I pulled it out, cut a few pieces. I was closing the blade, when someone bumped into me. The very sharp blade on my multi-tool closed; but caught about 2.5-3 inches of my wrist while doing so. I just barely kept back the naughty words as I made for the snack table to get some napkins or something. of course being the Hotel Dupont, they only had cloth napkins. I felt so bad bleeding all over two of them. Luckly my blood clots quickly, so I didn't need to get stiches, but I used quite a few bandaids to try and cover it till it healed enough that it stopped opening at random times.

Aside from that it has just been random cuts and scrapes from building or close encounters with the file cards. I am much worse with "non-dangerous" substances like Dykem and Anti-seize.

[Frank(Aflak)]

Originally posted by sigmakid108
I FOUND THE LIST HERE IT IS:

Top Ten Things Going Through President Bush's Mind At This Moment (Falling off a Segway)


10. "$@#$@#$@#$@# you, Al-Qaeda!"

9. "I'm sure Thomas Jefferson fell off his Segway every now and then"

8. "It looked so easy on 'The Jetsons'"

7. "I misunderestimated my center of gravity"

6. "Thank God no one got a picture of this"

5. "Only 4 days 'til Hulk! Only 4 days 'til Hulk! Only 4 days 'til Hulk!"

4. "$@#$@#$@#$@#, this thing would give Cheney, like, 3 heart attacks"

3. "Congratulations, Segway -- you just joined the axis of evil"

2. "To distract everyone, bomb the hell out of Syria"

1. "AHHHHHHHHH!"

No, no, its all wrong.

This is what GWB was thinking:

" "


And that is all he ever thinks.

[henryBsick]

Originally posted by team222badbrad
Yes we have had our cuts and scrapes here and their thankfully no serious injuries!

If anything has serious injuries it would have to be our robot.
Did you know you can dent lexan?
Did you know you can puncture lexan?
Did you know you can paint lexan by scrubing up with MOE?

Did you know our robot was dropped by a shipping company?
This drop would have to be the most damaging thing that our 2003 bot has seen. This bent our frame and broke a whole bunch of stuff including the operater interface controls.

I guess you can say our robot has almost been through Battle Bots. This is due to being in 4 FIRST competitions and 5 off-season events and it will be seeing its 6th off-season event this Saturday.

This will probably its retirement party....


I believe my friend Brad here is mistaken.
as some of you know we hve gum-rubber wheels, which are not the easiest to cut as our alumni Cliff found out. It involed a:
-drill press- $1,000(?)
-hole saw- $100
-1' gum-rubber- $80
-!Hey, look out! - free
-and one really priceless bruise on Cliff's stomach

[Noah]

Okay, so, Imagine that on one side of the Venice High Autoshop yard, about eight people are building this cool ramp that a robot is supposed to go up. Now imagine that on the other side of the yard, a certain programmer (cough cough ME) is testing an autonomous routine. Now visualize this robot (Which is from 2002 and therefor has a harpoon on the front to grab goals with) flys forward at top speed and executes a flawless right turn. The programming team rejoices! The people standing on top of a bridge that has yet to be held together and collapses with them on top of it, however....


Additionally, we learned that when you don't initialize PWM outputs, they default to zero. Zero, by coincidence, is FULL REVERSE. Engineers don't like getting hit in the shins by a 120 lb robot that was turned on only to go flying towards them in FULL REVERSE.

[Brm789]

Ok...anyone else have someone DROP your team's robot on you? I was trying out for comp. team, I think, last year and as a requirement you had to lift our robot. Well...Joe S. and I are lifting this thing fine until he doesn't give me a cue to lift and proceeds to go on without me. Nonetheless, the robot tips and I get a wire brush cleany thing (I forget what they were but this was on MOEHawk and we used them to stay attached to the floor) in the face/top of my head. OW! It hurt but I'm a girl and it was all guys so I sucked it up and acted as if nothing had happened.

As far as accidents go however...none have really occured to our team however....there was the elevator incident. *smirks*

Some of you might know this story, because someone must have posted it last year, but anyway....we were at Nationals in Huston in a hotel I thought was...well...old. Too old. The elevators scared me but who cared...we were having fun. It was a little over curfew when all of sudden I hear a lot of noise from the hallway. Out I go...walk a few steps and blink. My team is crowded around the elvator doors...close elvator doors. Oook...they've all lost it. Then I hear what I had to die laughing at...my mentors are stuck inside, pounding on the door to the rest of us outside. It was great. They were stuck in there for twenty minutes I think. They even tried prying the doors open which was...well...odd. No injuries occured but...wow....there could have been!

Also, I think one of our students, Chris, ended up smacking his head in the shower really badly when a couple other students squirted him. I forget exactly how that happened though.

[SaxMan701]

Yeah, minor scrapes and cuts and such.

At the Claverack meeting (local energy company, we always have a booth at their anual meeting) (some 222 people were there, but I don't think they heard about this), Sean was driving Chuck V around for everyone to look at, and he wanted to give me a hug with it. Now, it's not that easy to control how much the arms sqeeze, so I was walking away from it backwards. I eventually hit a picnic table, so I was down on that. Sean kept driving the bot closer to me, and the corner of some metal plate on the bottom of it scraped my leg. It was a thin cut, but about 3 inches long. It bled a lot.

Funny thing is that earlier that day, Rob threw a ball at the bot and it popped and was destroyed. I found out it was the same corner or a metal plate.

[Allison K]

Not a robot injury, but a funny hotel one

At he buckeye regional on friday night, a few of us were hanging out in one of the rooms watching a movie and generally goofing around. Well one kid on our team, Bat Boy, (well quite a few, but he was being particularily annoying that night) was talking and being generally annoying, so our driver (who is about double the size of the talker) decided to jokingly throw him out of the room and close the door. Unknown to Bat Boy, our driver then backed up so he could get back in, however Bat Boy ran and threw his entire weight into the door, which then slammed into our drivers forehead, leaving a huge gash right above his eye. He probably should have gone to get stitches and it was bleeding everywhere, but he didnt want to be at the hospital till 3 am cause he had to drive the next day so they just butterflyed it.

We still make fun of Bat Boy about that

Allison

[D.J. Fluck]

Heh this one is kinda funny.


A few weeks ago at Ford Sweet Repeat I was training one of the rookie kids. He pretty much got everything down early and eventually he was able to reset the robot between matches like the veteran pit crew. Although late in the day he was changing batteries when someone flipped the 120amp breaker switch on. He had one side of the battery disconnected completely and the other was still barely touching. Somehow (Im still not sure how) one of his fingers closed the open circuit and he got zapped. Luckily it wasn't bad though. I still can hear to this day what he said after that happened. Something like "Oh <profanities>!!!"

[Brm789]

Originally posted by Allison K
Not a robot injury, but a funny hotel one

At he buckeye regional on friday night, a few of us were hanging out in one of the rooms watching a movie and generally goofing around. Well one kid on our team, Bat Boy, (well quite a few, but he was being particularily annoying that night) was talking and being generally annoying, so our driver (who is about double the size of the talker) decided to jokingly throw him out of the room and close the door. Unknown to Bat Boy, our driver then backed up so he could get back in, however Bat Boy ran and threw his entire weight into the door, which then slammed into our drivers forehead, leaving a huge gash right above his eye. He probably should have gone to get stitches and it was bleeding everywhere, but he didnt want to be at the hospital till 3 am cause he had to drive the next day so they just butterflyed it.

We still make fun of Bat Boy about that

Allison

Allison, OMG! That's too funny! I think something similuar happened with the whole Chris incident.

Oh...yes...only recently Chris, the same one thrown into the bathtub, had to have his hair cut using *I think* wire cutters. I'm not sure how if got that but a rather large peice of duct tape was stuck on Chris hair and to itself. A few members tried to remove it but it was impossible so we ended up cutting it off. Fun times...fun times.

Oh yes...Ask Steven on our team what happens when you anger a girl on your team who has sharp nails. Heh. Steven went home alot of nights with cuts across his arm cause "someone" scratched the daylights out of him for being generally annoying.

[kevin.li.rit]

Our robot hasn't injured anyone on the team, but it did run over someone.

[Stephanie]

hmm... during the 2003 season my finger was nearly removed when the miter saw malfunctioned while i was cutting extrusion for the robot frame.
that saw was no good. that happened two or three times before it happened to me. i was just the first to get hurt. i have a nice scar from it, as well as the offending bit of extrusion. unfortunately, no one thought to take a picture just after it happened, so i have no gory photos to show :/
<edit> in 2002, our robot took it upon itself to start driving after our programmer uploaded the new program. the ball basket also fell, and hit a team member on the bridge of the nose, causing it to bleed </edit>

[Vincent Chan]

Paul Luffel was cutting some Lexan or simliar material (I don't recall exactly what it was,) last year with a Dremel. He ended up somehow putting the Dremel in his finger, cutting a 1/8-inch or so deep groove into it, and cauterizing the wound with the friction of the cutting disk. It was actually kind of cool, though it's not an experience I'd like to go through.

Three of us got stabbed by a hot soddering iron last year.

The only ROBOT-inflicted injury I can remember is one of our alumni tightenining down the nut on the frame of our bot, and the piston from the pneumatics slammed down pretty much on top of the nut. Someone, not paying attention, released the solenoid and squished his finger. It wasn't broken or anything, luckily.

[fox46]

Over the course of the build period, some of the metal on the robot will end up in you, and some of your skin will end up on the robot!

Two years ago, (zone zeal competition) our robot had a 50lb hopper that it would fill with balls, and then the hopper would get raised to the top of a goal, and then the balls would get dumped in. The hopper was lifted via scissor lift. SCISSOR lift! We were nearing the shipping deadline, and things were getting pretty crazy. I was installing some lock collars on the leadscrew mechanism that actuated the scissor lift. At the same time, another member was removing the pins that joined the scissors to the leadscrew so he could work on the hopper (which was 6ft up in the air at the time). I had told him to make sure to block up the hopper before he removed the pins, but unfortunately for me, he forgot. All of a sudden, I hear "holy %&*#" the robot jerks, and I realise that the hopper is decending VERY quickly, so I attempted to pull my arm out from between the lower pair of scissors, but I wasn't fast enough, and my pinky finger got caught between two scissor sections. I don't really remeber much except for white hot pain, and I think I said a few things made up mostly of four letter words! After I finished screaming, I looked at my finger, and it was like one of those bugs bunny cartoons- the tip was almost completely flat and bleeding alot! I ended up at the hospital, but amazingly, I didn't need stitches or anything, the finger was just really crushed, and after a few days, it "re-inflated" back to normal, minus a pair of deep gashes. I still have the scars, and the nail still looks a little wierd.

[BandChick]

i do believe while we were having driver training someone almost ran over mr. gregory (our advisor), but other than that i can't remember any REAL injuries. i did cut my hand open on a rough piece of metal, but i don't really count that.

we did slam into a pole in our annex and leave some black tire marks on the carpet though ;)

[kevin.li.rit]

Yes, well our Robot Actually Ran over someone, up and over.

[Smrtman5]

My team and I were fooling around with the bot, practicing driving it around and scaring people in the halls. So i got the bright idea to ride it. I crouched on top and it sped off. Then the driver gets the bright idea to drive forward and back really quickly to try to throw me off. It almost worked, but i stayed on.... till i looked back at him. He then proceeded to gun it, placing me firmily on my back. Billy claims to have heard the thud.

At least he didnt back up over me lol.

Almost forgot.. no story time is complete without Jimmy! Freshman year he cut off his thumb. Entirly...severed. I wasnt there to see it but i bet it wasnt fun. He got it reattached, but we used to tease him about his 'bionic thumb'

Such a loving group we are.

[Specialagentjim]

who remembers post-qualifying-rounds at epcot years ago?? Remember when we'd all drag our robots with people standing on them!! that was good times!

[Elgin Clock]

In houston this year we participated in Robot Cart Pulls outside after closing ceremonies.. good times!! lol What you would do is hook up your robot to your team's cart and pull or push yourself down the "raceway" and see who was fastest..

It was awesome after a hard weekend of competing!!

No injuries that I know of came from that... lol

[Arefin Bari]

last year before we shipped the robot... (once the robot was done) we were driving it around... unfortunately the ramp we had at motorola didnt have the railings on the side... and somebody was driving it off the ramp... one of our team member (mike) jumped in to catch the robot.. he had a big scratch on his hand... but it wasnt really a bad injury...

[BaldwinNYRookie]

oooooo... it's painful simply reading throught this thread...

[pickle]

Last year I smacked our president in the face autonomously(the goal was to drive along the line until it saw something in front of it close, then move the arm around and pray it knocked at 10pt ball off), but someone walked in front of the banner sensor and it clipped his neck pretty good.

THis year I dropped our 50 pound steel hoss of an arm on my head twice (once while uncrating, once while recrating), and had our elbow joint in the arm with our original massive gripper smack me in the head... And people wonder whats wrong with me *twitch*

[angelc24]

While unpacking the robot i stood up and bumped my head on our very bright pink claw. I'm lucky- that's the closest thing to an injury I've had(except for a killer headache from sleep deprivation). Last year someone almost cut their finger off with the band saw. A few days later while driving down the long, very steep hill that is the street that leads to our school, the same guy hit a light post.

[katiyeh07]

oh man one year, I wasn't on the team yet, but one night in the shop it was either Aidan or Ben who got shocked by the battery...and I can remember last year my grandfather was using the belt sander and nicked his nail on it, and my friend Ian and I were in shock, because right after he started using it like a nail file to fix it, the belt sander is now fondly known as "Ed's Nail Salon". but other than that, only scratches from lifting the robot up.

[i_am_Doug]

Our robot attacked our programmer autonomously.
that happend to are programmer...it was funny ;) sorry there Mr. Anderson


but... some one hit the joystix to try to stop motor buzzing but insted or hiting the joysticks he hit the boom down switch and BAM nailed him right in the head. i felt bad.

[Jverdon]

We have a kid on the team that drives a yellow lancer and we were working with the camera out side and the robot chased his car. It was pretty funny.

[Kate00]

The only kind of bad one that I can think of was when I was sawing a piece of plywood with a handsaw. The saw slipped, and cut through my thumbnail down pretty far. It bled quite a lot, but it's all healed now. The other Kate on our team got sliced by a cut bolt from our wings about halfway up her forearm. It wasn't a deep cut, but it was in an unfortunate position.

I think our team got more than it's share of cuts from our robot this year because the cut-off screws from our wings were so sharp. I mutilated two pairs of tights working on the robot before I changed out of my uniform. My mother wasn't happy.

I am probably forgetting something, but that's it for now.

[Winged Wonder]

during my freshman year, after helping wire GhettoBot, i decided to plug in a batter to see if any of my wiring actually worked the way it was supposed to. well, i didnt bother to check if the switch was on for some odd reason (which it turns out it was) so while i was sitting on the top of a table with our little wooden robot, i moved to plug in the battery and suddenly there was this sparkly flash! thankfully i didnt get hurt, nor did a friend of mine who just so happened to be walking past me at that time... but needless to say, i was banned from plugging in batteries for the rest of the build season.

at robot demos we generally let children drive the robot for a little (with guidance)... well.. generally bad things happen when we allow kids to extend our arm all the way (11 feet, mind you), because once its extended, they feel the need to move the arm, putting everyone in an 11 foot radius in danger, since when you move the arm just barely, it puts the center of gravity out of whack, and things come down, fast. thankfully no one has been hurt, but the first time i drove Roccobot 2k4 at a demo i was banned from being the arm operator because i had a bad habit of coming waaay to close to spectators. at a recent demo there was this specifically rambunxious little boy who wanted to try base driving, so i figured why not, as long as i had my hands on the controls as well it wouldnt be that big of a deal... NOT. the second i said "sure" he grabbed the controls before i could yell "watch out" to those standing by out pit crew chief who was explaining something about the robot by the robot at the time, and we ran into her ^^; shes okay, no real battle scars, but at nationals last year, she did scare us all in the stands when she held up a bloody rag. she hadnt gotten hurt by the robot, just had a freak-of-nature nosebleed, but we had a running joke that she got in a fight with one of the other teams.

none of those are really injuries though.. but this one is. this past build season while i was doing driving practice with our current human player (originally we had planned to try out to become the pink team's first female drive team, she being base driver and i tower operator) we had our human-player wannabe's run around doing Field Reset. we only had about 2 or 3 PVC tetras at a time on average (although we started off with more, while i was learning how to drive, i managed to break most of them by being less than gentile hand having a bad habit of dropping them) so our human player(s) would run around collecting the tetras as soon as we stacked them and placing them on our ghetto automated tetra station. well, one day, while our extremely hyper and impatient HP-wannabe was grabbing for a tetra immidiately after Maia and i had stacked it on top of a goal, he got swiped across the chest by our hook, because unfortuantly Maia had turned in the direction directly towards him, not away from him. he got a huge scrape across his chest (through his shirt!) from it, and although we felt bad, it still was kind of his fault for coming for the tetra on the same side as the goal as the robot.. hence we made the rule: Go to the opposite side of a goal to retrieve a tetra! ...and you can obviously see why neither of us ended up as drivers this year. :p


...on a random note... there are a lot of wing-related injuries! be careful everyone! ;) you are not immortal!

[spears312]

This past build season, for some reason, I developed the reputation of being able to hurt my self. OK, I did manage "knick" my self several times, and then there was that incident where I nearly pinched my finger while I was trying to shift a temporary tensioner on some chain, but nothing too serious. Now I've got our safety captain either trying pay off the paramedics to follow me or at least tape a small first aid kit to myself.

[hangloose]

Last year during the FIRST season, someone was testing the drive train on the robot and managed to drive over my brother.

This year, during another competition my team participates in, one of our mentors was helping us load things in the trailor and while attempting to tie something down with a bungee cord, it snaped and the hook hit him in the face and barely missed his eye. We took him to the hospital right away...and now he is all better!

[geeknerd99]

I now have a scar on my ankle from when the corner of our testbot (a kitbot) swiped me at roughly 8 feet per second. This just proves that going full speed with the joysticks coded incorrectly is a bad idea.

[Goldeye]

Our robot attacked our programmer autonomously.
I don't think this could get old.

Our auton story, with the camera. The day we finally have camera-driving as the autonomous mode on our testbot, 3 programmers, all named Josh, are wearing green. The first instance, where it seemed to not be working, and then suddenly noticed me, had me dive out of the way, and someone quickly hitting the switch. It was almost caught on camera, so we decided to stage it again and record it. This time, the bot doesn't notice me...it notices the other (unaware) Josh. As we test later...the third Josh suddenly walks in...but we were...prepared.

Our pneumatically folding arm was a bit of a problem, as well as our grabber. A mentor got hit on the head in the early days of testing it, and had a bit of bleeding...wasn't really a problem. Everyone wears hardhats while working on the bot since. One instance of the arm falling at high speed was saved by soft safety goggles. Boing!

[Argoth]

I had an injury this year because of my own stupidity. Some guys were cutting some 8020 extruded aluminum for our arm with a hacksaw (we're too poor to buy a ban saw) and they were taking forever. Well, time was getting short as well as my temper so I asked them what was taking so long. It ended up being that they had to make two cuts to completly cut through the aluminum and one was about an 1/8" off. The aluminum was in the vice and they had wasted quite some time trying to get the hacksaw to cut through sideways. I got angry and just grabbed the aluminum and snapped it off downwards with my hands curled around it. Well, in my anger I forgot to turn the vice away from the table so I ended up smashing my finger between the aluminum and some hefty 2x10's. I lost all the skin on the inside of my first ring finger knuckle as well as gained some nice hairline fractions to go along with it.

[Conor Ryan]

i have to say reading this most of the injuries are happening to the programmers, theres something funny about that...any who my story, i got my shoelace caught in last years robot drivetrain while repairing it, but i ripped it out before it did any damage.

[AJL930]

Last year, one of our mentors was using a bench grinder to grind down the edge of some aluminum extrusion, and wasnt using a vise grips to hold the aluminum. He slipped and ground half of his thumb off on the wheel. It was pretty bad.

Beside that injury, except for a few tools being dropped on peoples feet or having hands filled with metal slivers, nothing too serious.

[Eddie168]

Hmmm I remember in 2003 before the shipping date, the team was testing the robot and autonomus. I was sitting in the carpet and the driver suddenly drive foward too much and rammed my legs.

And this year. I was testing the arms of the robot and the arm swinged fast slamming the robot (no damage done). I was standing in the front and i dodged the arm but it went back down and hit my back. Hahahaha it didn't hurt much anyways

[BandChick]

Okay, so not so many ROBOT related injuries this year...

Our arm op, Shaivya, did get his head bashed by our arm though. And then he got glow stick liquid in his eye. Looooooots of fun :rolleyes:

[PURPLE!]

Phoenix:

Okay, it is really embarrassing when you have to go to the first aid person two times during a regional when you are the safety captain. The even more depressing thing was that it wasn't from the robot! The first time I got hurt was when I was carrying the team's control box. The fiberglass or whatever was so sharp it cut through my arm. I have a nice scar from it, although it didn't hurt at all. All after that incident I was in the pit, with a file, making sure no sharp edges existed, ANYWHERE!. My second injury was when I fell down the stairs and twisted my ankle. That wasn't a surprise. For some reason stairs just don't like me and I fall down them constantly...

Lone Star:

I was in the pit talking to three judges along with a few members of the team. Everyone else was working on the robot since they heard a scraping sound (ALL THAT NOISE CAME FROM ONE STUPID NUT!!). So we were doing the "delay of game, hey look at this" dance with the judges. 2 were the all around judges and the other was in charge of safety. I notice the team to the right of us had their robot slowly creeping closer and closer to us. Being the paranoid person I was I moved away the teammate that the robot was right behind. I'm glad I did because a second later the robot took off and attacked a freshman that was working on our bot. I'm not sure if it was on auto. mode (since we are covered in green) or if the joystick was uncalibrated but it sure gave us a shock. Luckily a few people including myself jumped on the robot and pulled it back before it actually hurt him, although we did have a quite shaken freshman on our hands.

[Dick Linn]

2004: One guy grabbed a soldering iron to move it - it had only been unplugged a moment before and naturally he grabbed the business end. My son lost a bit of skin on the big belt sander when the piece grabbed - it could have been much worse.

2005 - I think I slightly cracked my thumb this year. I was cutting aluminum angle on a compound mitre saw. When backing up out of the cut, it caught the small cut piece and launched the piece I was firmly holding down into the air. It whacked my thumb but good - stung like crazy. Was sore for about 1 1/2 months.

Do be careful out there.

[CraigHickman]

We seem to have injuries that don't really hurt all that much, but still are funny. One that has made a freshman on our team famous was when he tripped in front of the entire Sacramento regional. flat on his face.

Another was the the silicon valley regional. Our battery guy was running down the stairs to our pit to replace the battery when he tripped, and his ankle decided it would crap out on his landing. Needless to say, others on the team had to follow the paramedics to find out which batteries were charged.

[cire]

I have a couple from the this year. The stupidest one ever was when i was changing the type of bit holder for our lathe, and the knob at the end of the handle just shattered into 2 pieces and i got cut pretty bad because it was sharp plastic. I wasnt even pushing on the handle hard, it was realy low quality plastic. Another realy stupid one was when i got tap magic (for cutting aluminum) all over my hands by accident and i didnt realise it was a skin irritent until the next day, it went away in a few days though :] . Another potentialy very bad injury almost happened to my friend, he was working under the robot and the stand collapsed. I was the only person that had enough common sense to grab the robot and lift it off him, it took like 30 seconds of yelling at people to help get it off him! Thank god he didnt get hurt.

[Bcahn836]

Team 836 almost killed our lead mentor, well the robot almost did. We were testing the autonomous mode and the robot was supposed to go down the hall and turn right to line up with the vision tetra and bring up the arm. Our lead mentor though it would be a good idea to check the progress of our programming team and stands to the left in the hallway. At the line the robot takes off down the hall, turns left and pins our lead mentor against the wall with the arm between his legs, right as the arm was going up programming disabled the robot and saved our lead mentors :eek: family jewels :eek: .

[danield710]

most of the injuries on our team have been pretty minor, probly the most serious was when one kid, who wasnt too experiencd with tools, was taking out a drill bit from the drill press, and the bit fell off and slit his finger, he had to get stitches
I have gotten a bunch of minor injuries like cuts or metal in my fingers, but thats just part of the experience of working in the machine shop
also last year one of our mentors was hit by our robots arm, and he hurt his shoulder
probly one of the most serious injury didnt happen to a person but to the machine shop that we were workin in. in 2003 we were testing autonomous and the robot didnt turn and went right through the wall, the mentor (who was the owner of the machine shop) was really mad, because there was a huge hole in his wall the size of our robot, to this day u can see the outline of the bot, even though they reparied the wall

[StephLee]

The only "injury" we had was the robot running over my foot just before ship. It was slightly blue for a day or so, but that HURT. Our driver was nearly decapitated when the robot took off at full speed during autonomous testing(a lesson to the programmers the hard way about speed), but thankfully he dove out of the way so it didn't hit him.

[angelofsumthin]

our robot (from stack attack) used to have this huge arm and when it was all the way forward our robot would like tilt and wobble
so one day sumone leans on the controls while its holding a crate...and it whips around
it almost decapitated our whole team that was standing there....except sumone warned us and we all pulled a matrix (if yknow wat i mean)
we still talk about it

[Denman]

Apart from me getting my finger caught once in the 2003 bots lifter (silly mistake, didn't do any damage) not much has happened luckily. Apart from running my foot over several timeS ( i wear toe tectors nowadays ;) ) not much has happened to us.

[Justin Montois]

Man, i guess we need to pay more attention to safety, I can't believe this thread has gone to seven pages

The only Injuries 340 encountered was during auton programming with everyone watching at 2 AM, not exactly fast reflexes:)

[Beta Version]

There was a close miss while building the bot. Our capes and the design on are shirts are bright green, so we figured out the hard way that our robot's autonomous was working when it started chasing us around. It was quite scary because our grabber is three huge spikes, and when the robot meets green, it shoots/lifts spikes up. It would have been very painful if it had caught us before our programmer frantically shut it off. (the autonomous functions that tried to kill us are controlled by Victor #3, which also likes to shock people working on the electronics: hence my avatar and signature.)

[pickle]

ooh, I just remmebered one, not really an injury, but an amusing story.

We were testing out our camera stuff (which failed miserably in the end), but we did get it to follow green at one point, anyway, so I was working in the hallway because hte lighting was better, and i had someone about 30 feet down the hallway holding a green triangle. Well, I was apparently taking too long tweaking things, and he fell asleep, behind the triangle. Well, it tracked the green really well, ran right into the sleeping guy holding the triangle. He jumped like 8 feet into the air. Then he ran down the hall and had the robot chase him, it was amusing... and the only time our camera worked :(

[PURPLE!]

I am hearing a lot of almost loosing finger stories, but I am curious to know if anyone actually has lost one working on a FIRST competition.

[Chris Sturrock]

I only know of one major injury this year...

While cutting down a piece of metal to mount our cameras, one of our mentors, Matt, accidentally slipped and almost cut his finger off. He got rushed to the hospital and had about 9 or 10 stitches put in...

that incident, although very serious, Is now joked about by everyone, especially matt. It also earned him the nickname nine-fingers...

[stealth13777]

This year at peachtree some repairs had been done to the robot and we were testing it in the pit (the arm) to make sure it was working again. I worked but in the process it smacked one of the ream members in the top of the head. There was a nice gash in his head, but he was one of our drivers and we were being qued. He drove the robot with blood dripping down his face. After the match it was bandaged up and he was fine.

[Cyberguy34000]

At the Denver Regional event, a limit switch was acting on the forklift arm on our bot, so we tried to fix it in the pit. Programming tried using a slightly modified program to fix it, and it ended up pulling the arm down way past its limit. The chain's turnbuckle snapped under the tension (stripped the threads clean off), and the chain whipped out a good 4-5 feet in front. Sent the turnbuckle screw flying a few pits over. Lucklily no one was in front of the bot when it snapped, so no one got hurt.

Those programmers will kill us all someday :)

[|20807 61|2|_]

I was the first and only (so far) to get hurt on my team. We were testing our ball gatherer, and I was trying to tighten a bolt. While I was doing this a fellow team member, who will remain nameless, was attaching a drill to make a roller spin. The fellow team member by accident pulled the trigger and the roller started with my hand inside. :ahh: My hand got stuck and was hit pretty hard(about 2000 rpm) with surgical tubing, that was added onto it for extra friction. I have a splint on my finger right now and most likely will have to get surgery after build season is done. :( At least I will never forget this year. :rolleyes:

[Rick TYler]

Two of our prototypes have blood on them. Does that count?

(Band-aid injuries -- drywall screws are very sharp.)

[|20807 61|2|_]

(Band-aid injuries -- drywall screws are very sharp.)

Wow theres something we all need to watch out for :yikes:

[devicenull]

Last year.. I was sitting at a table behind the robot, making our auto mode.. I think you can figure out where this is going. Robot going full reverse at me. I also remember having to hold the robot back that year.. I probably ran the motors full speed at auto, and our power switch wasn't exactly in a good place.. couple inches from a drive wheel. So it was easier to hold the robot back and make someone else shut it off.

There was also that time our robot broke one of the encoders at a pre-ship competition.. so decided to disconnect the other one. This resulted in the robot going full speed across the field at the next match. No one got hurt there though.


This year.. well, we had just completed the drive train on our prototype, so I actually downloaded the drive code we use. One of the joysticks had been intentionally uncalibrated (With the default code, if you play with the calibration, it's a cheap way of making the motor run at a constant speed) I moved the PWM's around, and after the code got downloaded I had a robot going full speed towards a cabinet.

That was when I learned that the kitbot is pretty easy to hold back if you lift up the back wheels.

We made a very cool looking and easy to use disable switch this year.. Two of these (http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2062493&cp=2032058.2032230.2032278&parentPage=family) .. Set up so that when the covers snap shut, everything gets disabled. :)

[slickguy2007]

2004... A life changing experience

First off, may I say that its never a good thing when you hear someone shout "hey, look what i can do". The robot with the arm up comes out of nowhere and hits me. That was okay, but what happened next wasn't. The robot's controls were sensitive and i am 99% sure this was an accident but the arm swung into my head. The arm hit me and knocked my face into the concrete wall. I was down for a few minutes and someone claimed that I was unconcious for a while. For those of you who know me, this explains my eccentric personality .... :p (Suffered from a few bruises on my face)

Next, we have the pneumatic arms and autonomous. The programmer decided to try something new with the code in the pits. He was at the opposite side of the pit area and I was on the other side of the robot changing the battery. He asked me if i was out of the way, and I said no. He obviously didn't hear me. Not only did the extrude aluminum pin my leg against the table, but the nets for the ball hopper were opening and closing without limit at a very fast speed into my face. I was hit in the face about 4 times before they realized what was going on. (Suffered from a lump on my head)

Finally, we have the "omg, what was that" situation. I was scouting, like a good freshman ;) when it happened. I was talking to a team at their pit station and all of a sudden I hear, "heads up!". I must say, wow! That was perhaps the scariest thing that has ever happened to me. The team extended their 12ft arm all the way up and their hook was double pronged and it looked very sharp(I will never what it looked like :p ). The bot was unsteady and so it tipped forward. The hooks missed my face by about 3 inches. Had that have hit me, I really don't know what would have happened. The robot came crashing down and just wow. A lot of people rushed over b/c they saw my face go completely white(people thought I was going in shock), about 20 people asked me if I was okay.

Its great and at times humorous to share experiences from previous year, but also realize that these stories can be valuable safety tips. I know that based on what happened to me in 2004, I changed a lot of my safety habits. 2005 was incident free. :)

GO SAFETY!!!

[rufu5]

I'll let my team website's "under-construction" gif explain our latest injury ;)

http://teamroboto.org/scotty.gif

:ahh: SCOTTY! ... :o duck

[JBotAlan]

Last year when I was still on 1140, I was writing some code to "smooth out" the input from the joysticks so that I wouldn't see the death of the transmissions. I, the rookie that I was, assumed that PWM outputs center around 0...you programmers out there know what I'm talking about...anyhow, the code was running, I tapped Reset with a teammate working on the frame, and the 'bot plowed him over, leaving a huge bruise on his leg and pinning the bot under a desk, where there to this day is a huge gouge in the paint...oops.

I also was working a bug out at competition last year, where my code wasn't changing "states" during auton, and it turned out I was using an = instead of ==...I fixed it, but didn't have testing time, so the robot at the beginning of the match spun the turret until it smacked the plexiglass in front of the drivers with impressive force, drove out about 6 feet, and spun the turret about 5 times around in 2 seconds...ripped out the power to the compressor, the valve to open the pneumatic claw, and the team color lights. I was rejoicing because I found my bug, now I just had to work out the timing. The rest of the team didn't see it from my point of view... :yikes:

And then there's the time when we hit the head safety judge's hand with the end of the claw...I'll just leave it to your imagination. :-)

JBotAlan

P.S. YAY TESTING TIME!!!

[Chief Samwize]

Ive only had two so far....

1) well im a rookie and when i joined the team the first thing i did was watched our main welder weld (thats what he does) and, well i sort of grabbed a piece of scorching hot metal :eek: i had a burn for two weeks.

2) while things were kind of slow around the shop we were tosing a poof ball back and forth and i backed into the corner of a table, hard! i ripped my pants, underwear and i put a big ole scratch right in my butt. GREAT WAY TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION TWORDS THE TEAM :rolleyes:

[LightWaves1636]

i don't know about the rest of the team, but I got a splinter when I was moving the board that had our processors on

[i_am_Doug]

Well. One time we where in zerox and we where in the loading bay testing the amount of ft the robot could extend and put tetras on the goal. well are robot was havin some problems.Like the joy stixs where REALLY TOUCHY. so our programmer Mr. *no name*had stepd under the robot. I dont think he remberd that the robot was still on. one of our Rookies, had gently taped the left stick. Well the robot LEAPED 5ft at our programer. and hit him smack dab in the middle of his forehead. and since hes tall if he was short like most of you ;) he wouldnt of gotten hit.

Second. this happend to me. Ok, i was given a job to buff up some of are supports for the A frame. well hehe i did what i was told i buffed them allong with my fingers. Man those buffers i tell you have some strenght in them....My hand was really shiny! and red...

Theres many more so ill just limit it to two (*_*)

~Doug,Commander of war storys.

[Leo 1529]

i slit my thumb with a sheet of steel and it bled forever...earlier that day it was the senior blood drive and i fortunately didn't give blood because if i did then i would have prolly passed out from all the blood that i lost..it was very bad cut that is still currently healing

[robotoby35138]

i was cut zip ties off our prototype and i cut my firnger with a razor blad. then with our prototype cannon i got shot in the nuts :eek:

[dude__hi]

Nothing worth mentioning other than a guy who drilled into his finger to the bone....then there's always fiberglass that burrows into the skin

[pyroslev]

No "Major" injures to anyone

Fair share of booboos

As for me, I've stubbed/bruised/smashed all fingers and toes, cut no less than five fingers, gotten 1 minor cold(heat went out in shop),
heat my head, had my nose clipped multiple times, shins hit with wings in 2003, fiberglass, metal shavings and then the Norwalk outbreak of VCU in 2004.

[spamified88]

Hmmm... where to start? Well, two years ago one student was cutting a 2x4 and somehow he got sawdust past his goggles. This one isn't robot related to a robot, but one girl ate shrimp on our trip to the chesapeak regional and she broke out in hives and had to go to the hospital, apparently she didn't know she was allergic. Last year one kid repeatedly, like 20 times in 5 minutes, picked up angle iron just after cutting it on a chop saw. He didn't get hurt but it was kind of funny because he would forget every two seconds that metal gets hot when you cut it. Also, one girl cut into her finger with a drill. Finally, I think someone got hit with part of the robot last year. Wow, that's alot for just being in FIRST for 2 years. :ahh:

[Andrew Blair]

My FIRST lesson of FIRST: Don't try to clean the flutes of an endmill, while holding onto the flutes. 2004 was a bloody year.



Endmills are sharp.:ahh:

[Kyle A]

The lesson I learned was to never put a popped chain back on with the robot and operater interface on. It will leave you with a nice chain shaped scar on your hand.:)

[Billfred]

So far in 1293's history, one idiot has managed to claim both the first and second place slots on the list of our worst injuries: me.

Luckily, it wasn't so bad. The year was 2004. The night before ship, and two students decided to test out Bob. We didn't have a dongle back then (when I say that we were rookies, I really mean it), so the robot began its long drive to the ball tee in a room full of then-new computers on very rickety tables. I set down my work and run to the robot to try to trip the main breaker, since a tripped main breaker means the robot stops. Only then it started to make its turn, meaning Bob's arm was moving to where my leg was. I tip and fall, hurting my wrist a bit and being thoroughly embarrassed.

The other incident wasn't as bad. It was Palmetto 2005, and we're in the practice area with Ockham. Our driver didn't set the dongle to disable, but tipped back the control board to pick it up. This throws Ockham into a nice little reverse--right where I was standing. Didn't do any damage to speak of, since the frame rode up onto my shoes and I held it off long enough for our driver to get it stopped.

Moral of the stories?
*If you mentor a rookie team, make sure they have a dongle. (It really costs all of $20 to do, less if you don't want fancy switches.)
*Make sure your team wears closed-toe shoes and safety glasses. If it takes you wearing a pink tutu and being the Safety Glasses Fairy, so be it.
*Know what the robot's going to do.
*Disable the robot when you're doing anything with the controls but using them.

[Mr. Freeman]

I never imagined that you might need to wear a cup for robotics. Of course, it turns out that you do.

The interesting thing is, we weren't even using the robot. Just "practicing" by throwing the foam balls at each other.

[dubious elise]

I am hearing a lot of almost losing finger stories, but I am curious to know if anyone actually has lost one working on a FIRST competition.
A student on our team lost, I believe, from the 1st knuckle down (counting from the palm) of one of his fingers at a competition 4 or 5 years ago. We had a drive system with a chain on it and while it was being repaired in the pits, for whatever reason, his hand was in the bot when the robot was turned on. It was very frightening for everyone on the team and was a lesson to us all about staying clear of the robot while it is in the pits.

[Borisdamole]

my first year on the team, We were at Chatsworth(a practice comp.) and i was holding the robot on its side. We were testing the air compressor and the ball herders on that system. Then the ball herders kind of attached me.lol
No lasting damage, just some bruises.lol

[Cory]

Am I the only one who thinks it really isn't the brightest idea to post how you injured yourselves at robotics, for all the world to see?

[Zyik]

The only one I can think of currently is the time person, now a team member at competition put a zip tie around his hand. Guess how he got it off. If you guessed tried to cut it off using his palm as the surface with his knife and had to be rushed to the ER on competition, you were correct.

[Zyik]

Am I the only one who thinks it really isn't the brightest idea to post how you injured yourselves at robotics, for all the world to see?
If you do then hopefully others won't make the same mistake.

[hopkins]

Our last match in Atlanta our robot was having a shoving match with a robot on the other team. The other team tipped over... and fell on me... remember those robots were 15+ ft hight... all i had was a scratch but i was kind of surprised to see that people didn't seem to care, i had to hurry back to my square and the match moved on.

[EOC]

Last year our robot broke my heart.

[keithv708]

One time it was a progamming; :ahh:

[paulcd2000]

i cut myself on a chair while reading this thread
I'm serious. the chair has a sharp point, and i cut myself on it while reading this

[CourtneyB]

Last year, i believe i vagely remember what happened, but one of our great mechanical student (he graduated) cut his finger deeply on a machine. i might be wrong but he cut himself badly on sumthin last year. Theres alot of finger injuries

-Court-

[Arkorobotics]

A member got his fingers stuck in between the chain and sprocket. Ouch..


We had this close call:
The CMU Cam was aimed to red and one of our members was wearing a Red Citroën jacket and when we said follow the red it chased him down our hall way. He took a sharp turn on a corner and the robot took a sharp turn perfectly (looked like a movie stunt) and then the guy threw off this jacket. Lucky him. The robot was a bull and could have seriously injured him.

['lil Gach]

Last year, i believe i vagely remember what happened, but one of our great mechanical student (he graduated) cut his finger deeply on a machine. i might be wrong but he cut himself badly on sumthin last year. Theres alot of finger injuries

-Court-

Courtney is right, he was using a sander and is finger got to close. It ended up sanding off is finger nail I think.

There were also a lot of injuries to people's heads from our fingers. I know that there were a few times I had my had in the robot and would go to lift my head and I would hit one of the fingers. It didn't feel good at all. I know that there were a few people that did that. Last year one of the girls and I were doing some electrical stuff and we both got burned. She got burned from a hot glue gun and I burnt my arm on the heat gun.
There were only a few injuries.

Tiffany

[KTorak]

We've never had anything serious, just a few minor cuts from those sharp edges. As for something funny...one of our engineers was standing next to a mill and we went to go use the jog function intead of cranking it back 20 something inches...and the engineer was hit right below the belt in an very uncomfortable spot with a handle spinning at 100in/min...Set it back to Zero! is still an inside joke to many team members.

[MrBamboo]

one of our builders cut off a 1/3 strip of his thumb while handling the drill press with a special drill bit with blades on it, he didn't clamp the pvc pipe we were drilling and the drill press pulled the pipe into the bit with his hand holding on to it. Had to go to the hospital and when we found the strip of flesh on the ground later (we didn't realize it was completely cut off until then) we called the hospital and they told us it was too late and couldn't attach it back. This was this year and just like a week ago. He's still recovering :-/ It was a pretty serious injury. He's getting better though.

Other than that, a few minor injuries, ppl burning their hands touching hot fresh-cut metals, splinters from wood, etc.

[Zach Purser]

Here's a cool invention that saves your fingers when you're working with wood, now we just need to make it work for metal.

http://www.sawstop.com/

I wonder if it would be possible to build this technology into a robot so if it came into contact with someone the main power would be shut off. The mechanism is a variation of touch-lamp technology and as long as the robot has rubber wheels or treads it seems like it should work.

[Validius]

last year i became confused during driving practice and ramed the robot into one of the engineers. He wasnt very happy about that......

[Validius]

Ever since we got the competition box with the disable switch i hve been a nazi about having it on whenever people are around or when i go to check somthing. It is truely a great feature.

[Matt Krass]

Was debugging autonomous positioning on the test robot, set to maintain a position. I over-dialed a potentiometer I was using for tweaking. Robot shot backwards, slammed me up against a work bench and pinned me, out of reach of the OI, my girlfriend hit the kill switch and knocked the dongle off, making it useless, then I managed to kick the tether out.

Life lesson, even if it's not programmed to move, stay clear!

[Rick TYler]

Life lesson, even if it's not programmed to move, stay clear!

Safety tip: Our cart is narrower than our drivetrain on purpose. The wheels hang in space so we can test code without the 'bot moving. All changes happen on the cart first, then on the ground. It just takes a second to lift it onto the cart.

Team members still hit their heads on the tetra arm of Wooden Thunder, though. Even with the breaker for the pneumatics pulled and the PWM cables removed from arm motor outputs, it's still going after skulls -- when people bending over to work on the electronics stand up without thinking. We're using Woodie as the testbed for our new code, but we still don't want to remove the arm. Once Top Gun is up and running, Woodie gets to be the sparring partner.

[KrtZer0]

There was the time last year at anapolis when the robot almost fell out of the arena, almost hitting one of the judges....

[MikeDubreuil]

Most injuries can be avoided by better planning and not trying to work faster while doing it carelessly.

Several years ago a rookie team went to nationals without a working robot. My team, 175 at the time, and other teams worked together to get them a working robot. Their mentor was working carelessly to get them a working faster. He ended up cutting a pretty big gash in one of his fingers while using a saw. He ended up needing stitches.
Last year at the championship a member of my team was fairly seriously injured. He was standing next to the robot in the pits and we had placed the robot on an unsteady support structure of our robot cart and the kit boxes. The robot fell and the corner of the frame tore through his leg. It went through so deep you could see bone. Nedless to say blood was everywhere and he was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. I think he needed about 20 stitches to close the wound, This year we're designing a better cart.

[Schneidie]

Yeah, a few years back, one of our team members was using the drill press and had just changed the bit. I've only heard about this one, but anyways, she left the chuck key in the drill press and our chuck key is chained to the back of the drill press. She turned on the machine and a few of her fingers were all black and mangled for a few weeks. she' sstill on the team, and has had no further injuries.

[Marcel]

Well we had a few...Last year we were working on the arm and theese two fools were playng around one of our veterans who was doing something with this thread I believe, well in a nutshell one kid pushed the other and hit the arm or something and than the veteran nearly lost his finger. >.< Wow theres alot of finger related injuries during building season...

Hmm so descriptive... :ahh:

[Jaine Perotti]

Yeah, a few years back, one of our team members was using the drill press and had just changed the bit. I've only heard about this one, but anyways, she left the chuck key in the drill press and our chuck key is chained to the back of the drill press. She turned on the machine and a few of her fingers were all black and mangled for a few weeks. she' sstill on the team, and has had no further injuries.This is why, usually, the chuck key has a springloaded end so that it is impossible to leave it in the chuck without pressing it in with your hand. That way, injuries of this type are avoided. Sometimes these injuries can be really serious. I have heard of people leaving the chuck key in a lathe, and when they turned it on, the key was shot out as if it were a bullet (people have been killed this way).

Personally, I have never been seriously injured while working on the robot (except for minor scrapes and cuts), although yesterday I got a blood blister on my middle finger when I accidentally pinched it in our bearing press (ouch!).

Once though, one of the members of our team (I believe this was 2002) drilled through his hand while trying to build one of the rolling goals for Zone Zeal. Another kid also scratched his cornea (I forget how) in 2002 during the Championships in Orlando. Nothing very serious has ever happened since this though.

[Marcel]

Another injury we had that wasn't related to anything of the arms was when we had this milling machine and we were cutting this peice. Someone didn't close the door correctly of the case of the CNC Milling machine and we had some sawdust in there, and well long story short this guy got some sawdust in his eyes. Its not really an injury but he had some problem trying to get the dust out of his eyes. :/

Sometimes after an injury has occured you can look back and laugh at it, especially if the victom makes fun of it :P

[Dick Linn]

We had a close call not too long ago. A metal cutting 10" sawblade on a mitre saw had damaged teeth. The fellow using it didn't notice, and had another tooth break off and fly into his safety goggles, right in line with one eye. It put a rather significant crater in the lens, but didn't penetrate. ALWAYS WEAR EYE PROTECTION.

[Nuttyman54]

I have heard of people leaving the chuck key in a lathe, and when they turned it on, the key was shot out as if it were a bullet (people have been killed this way).


Didn't Ken Stafford say his teacher demo'ed it by leaving the chuck key in and then placing a wooden board between him and the machine? something about the key almost ripping through the wood...

[Aburame Shino]

I've cut up my arms and hands a bit while working on the robot before, but as far as I know nothing major's happened.

[RoboDriver]

We Have Three count em' three first aid kits just in case and just in case happens a lot ;) ;) :rolleyes:

[Spindash54]

Yesterday was a very... unique day.

After I read this thread a dodgeball game erupted in the workshop (I know you're thinking this won't end well). So after not playing the game in 7 years, I eagerly joined in. Once I had my fill, I ran into the wood closet for shelter. However, the walls don't reach the ceiling, and the guys threw balls over the wall.

One of them hit a metal T-Square and the edge landed right in the back of my neck. So now I'll have a disfiguring scar across my back forever...YAY!

And remember, this all happened RIGHT AFTER I read this thread...

[oaktown1188]

our driver was cut on her face by our robots arm and our human player, during a round in atlanta I believe, had a robot fall and hit her while she was standing in her human player box.

[Rick TYler]

our driver was cut on her face by our robots arm and our human player, during a round in atlanta I believe, had a robot fall and hit her while she was standing in her human player box.

I saw a robot fall over on someone's head in 2005 at Portland. I've read about other incidents on CD. I STILL cannot imagine why FIRST didn't require hard hats last year. It's a miracle that no one was badly hurt.

Can't see much use for hard hats in this year's game, though. And that's a good thing...

[Buster Wolf]

i have been giving only a moderate amount of blood to our robot this year.

[Wolf103FM]

i had one today where i had a stupid moment and got out of the chair and walked right into the robot, which wasn't even powered on and scratched my leg

[Charger_07]

Not any serious injuries on our team, hopefully it stays that way. As far as minor injuries, i got hit on the side of the head w/ a poof ball we launched out of the robot, i almost got nailed in the balls by a poof ball, and then right after that i got hit right in the face with a poof ball, it didnt feel to great

[Nimmy]

Didn't Ken Stafford say his teacher demo'ed it by leaving the chuck key in and then placing a wooden board between him and the machine? something about the key almost ripping through the wood...

our teacher didn't demo it to us but he did say that he lost a co-worker that way, permanently I mean...

probably the most lethal machine in our workshop (unless of course you play tag with the drills :ahh: )

[Chuck Glick]

well last week our team had one of our first injuries... i was making a hole larger on one of the copper battery terminals and silly me rushed through and forgot to clamp it down and sliced up my thumb pretty good when the copper caught the bit. but luckly it didnt affect my abilities too bad

[BandChick]

I can't believe I haven't posted this yet!
One of our mentors was cutting down a connector for our base, and the metal got stuck in the gear. It took off a big chunk of teeth, and put a few nice indents into our connector. But worst of all, there was a big chunk taken out of our mentors finger. 17 stitches worth.

[Charger_07]

Man, some of these injuries make my injuries like accidently sanding my finger on the belt sander and cutting my thumb w/ a screw driver look like nothing

[spadercool]

:yikes: One team member cut himself on wirecutters. Funny scene, now there is a joke going around.

[mechanicalbrain]

Last week I was pulling a piece of 80/20 out of a socket that it was stuck in. Well I gave a good heave and the bar popped right out. Smacked me right in the eye (I was wearing safety glasses though). What scares me was it cracked the glasses and left a little cut on my eyelid, if I hadn't been wearing glasses I probably would have done some serious eye damage.

The lesson: It doesn't matter what you are doing, if you are near the robot you need glasses.

[spamified88]

Ok, yesterday, for the the first time our robot was moving around, and I realized that if you stop really fast, robots will fall down on you! :ahh:

[Éowyn]

Nothing happened on our team some band-aids could'nt handle. :D A couple of kids cut their hands on metal shavings from drill bits, and I nicked myself with the hand deburrer.(While using it left-handed. :rolleyes: ) The worst injury came when one of our mentors went skiing with his daughter and came back with his hand covered in band-aids. I think he got his hand caught in the lift or something. :)

[IraJason]

well last week our team had one of our first injuries... i was making a hole larger on one of the copper battery terminals and silly me rushed through and forgot to clamp it down and sliced up my thumb pretty good when the copper caught the bit. but luckly it didnt affect my abilities too bad

I'm sure it hurt Chuck, but it wasn't that bad... at least you weren't gushing blood. Nothing a few band-aids couldn't fix.

Though a few members on our team thought that they red wire was the drill press covered in your blood. It took a little bit before we realized that it was just the wire wrapped around the bit.

The good news is that the battery terminal and wire still works, and I believe its been put onto the robot. I think that was the more important issue in this whole ordeal... right Chuck?

[UnknownUser1989]

yea there was this one happened on like 3rd week of build. So we were testing our ball gatherer, and Katie was trying to tighten a bolt. While she was doing this a fellow team member Aaron, was attaching a drill to make a roller spin. The fellow team member Aaron by accident pulled the trigger and the roller started with Katie's hand inside. Her hand got stuck and was hit pretty hard(about 2000 rpm) with surgical tubing, (which was there for added friction). Katie now has a splint on her finger right now and most likely will have to get surgery after build season is done. At least Katie and Aaron will never forget this year. Note to self when ppl come near u with a drill ask them if it is in neutral.

[Daniel Morse]

On the 5th week of build one of our members (a very entertaining character by nature) accidentally drilled through his finger. He said "I am not going to look down because I think I drilled a hole through my finger, and it is probably bleeding". Other than that, it has been a good year.

[UnknownUser1989]

this isn't a injury but it was pretty funny. last year our robot decided to spin out of control in circles with the arm fully extened and a tetra on the finger. it didn't hit any1 but it scared a jude so bad that he jump out of his chair n ran away. a couple seconds later the bot fell over n the wheels kept tryin to spin. throughout all this the robot kept the tetra on the finger. :ahh:

[mizscience]

Our robot attacked our programmer autonomously.


lmao! just the way you phrased that made it 10 times funnier :D

:]

[mizscience]

luckily, i have yet to suffer any major robotics injuries, the worst so far being shallowly slicing my finger while using a double-bladed exacto knife. though last year, one of our mech guys got dragged around the room by the robot when one of the kids turned on the controller w/o realizing it would actually control the robot :rolleyes:


:]

[Matt Royek]

I'm not sure anyone was injured per sé, but we did a test during build season in which we had to see how much our driving base could pull/push. So, we had a couple brave members get on the ground, flat on their stomachs, and have the robot pull them the length of the hall. Good times.

My personal injury could possibly be considered robot-related, as I had to unsolder a few things from a board to use with the robot. These were also secured with hot glue, which had to be removed to get to the solder.

Burnt myself 4 times with hot solder and I think I lost a ton of brain cells from inhaling melting glue.

[BandChick]

Yesterday our team was testing out our shooter. We loaded the ball which went up, hit the ceiling, hit the shooter, and then hit our mentor in the face! >_< We have video! It's pretty funny....

[JakeOfIron]

our CNC operator has scars all over his hand from cutting it on the drill bit. Our funniest injury, though was last year, when three of us were trying to shorten a bolt to use on a table for our pit. We used a hacksaw, and failed to realize it would get very hot. I think each of us tried to pick it up three or four times, burning our hands each time. The running joke now is "Ug! Bolt hot!" The worst part is that we took the second bolt to one of our Senior manufacturing guys, who shortened it with ease and lack of burning with the belt grinder.

[Chris Sturrock]

This year, there was an accident with a student and a lathe. She was working on the lathe, and while she was tightening the chuck, she forgot to take the chuck key out, and she also forgot to take her hand off the chuck key, before she turned the lathe on. she split her finger open almost all the way across, she lost her nail, and she broke the bone. she immedietly went to the hospital.

it is almost healed and she can help here and there now.

[JakeM]

Last year, there was a senior team member who tried to convince a rookie that the big red button on the controller was a self destruct switch. Of course, he pushed it and the robot went into its dead reckoning autonomous across our shop and into the desk I was working behind, pushing it along with me into the wall. There was no lasting effects, but it sure was interesting.

Last year, again in the off season, our team was moving our equipment into storage in a semi trailer, so our tool chest needed to be disassembled. While putting it back together, I slid the loaded hammer drawer onto its runner and as I prepared to do the same on the other side, the clip gave and the drawer fell, leaving a gash around my thumb leaving the ligaments visible and partially severing a nerve. It took 5 stitches to get it back together.

And on a completely unrelated note, I have been working this whole build season with a broken wrist.

[maltz1881]

Well as many of you know by now Team 1322 has had a very serious accident. Our top mentor lost 2 fingers building our battery plug in case. Every team has by now read about us and Team 663. Our condolences, thoughts and prayers are with 663. Accidents happen but when somebody is hurt, maimed or even worse it is not a funny matter. Safety should always be the fore front of everybodys mind. We always preach it to our kids but do us adults always take the same precautions when the kids aren't around. We now have a sign on our door that reads " Do you remember the Alamo, maybe not but always remember the Joe". I would never ever want another team or family to go through what we have since Saturday night.

[jonathan_powers]

our big injury this year was actually a member of a different team that we helped start. they figured they could throw a robot together in a few days and it was easy well 3 weeks into it they came to our lab with a unopened kit of parts needless to say we built them a rolling box and were going to help them with a harvister this weekend. so im going a mile a minut trying to get a kit bot frame put together for them and i hand 1 of there 4 students a piece to cut and a hack saw well needless to say he almost took his thumb off then after lunch i find him randomly cutting on the band saw but its all ok because he wsa wearing his safty glasses lol

[techie_Britt]

Well as many of you know by now Team 1322 has had a very serious accident. Our top mentor lost 2 fingers building our battery plug in case. Every team has by now read about us and Team 663. Our condolences, thoughts and prayers are with 663. Accidents happen but when somebody is hurt, maimed or even worse it is not a funny matter. Safety should always be the fore front of everybodys mind. We always preach it to our kids but do us adults always take the same precautions when the kids aren't around. We now have a sign on our door that reads " Do you remember the Alamo, maybe not but always remember the Joe". I would never ever want another team or family to go through what we have since Saturday night.


Okay well I'm a little late on things...what happened to team 663?

[Kirk]

This last Sunday I was using out compound miter saw to cut some aluminum and my finger got sucked into the saw blade. Lucky I didn't loose then end of my finger. Here is a like to a pic after the doctors in the ER stitched it back together.

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT!!! (http://myspace-720.vo.llnwd.net/00498/02/75/498285720_m.jpg)

But here it is 4 days later and the finger is feeling better and I am back working on the robot like nothing ever happened.

Kirk

[Rachika Garcia]

The jist of the injuries were to our robot. This year we were out on our field in front of the school, testing on how fast our balls were shooting. Just as we pulled the triger the sprinklers turned on. To make it a little worse, our robot was exactly over the sprinkler head wasking our electronics.

[fnsnet]

This thread is HUGE!

Back my Senior year (2003) for Stack Attack, on one of our MANY late nights in the Ag shop programming auto I swore the robot had it in for John while he was keeping the Programming cord from bring run over. I made one little change in the code that made the robot want to run him down... but the disable button saved him :-D.

To further that, ALL teams should have a disable button created and post someone at that button at all times during testing. It ought to be a MUST in your testing phase. Don't just use a switch, get one of those two position mushroom head stop buttons that you push in and pull out... and have them near it like they are getting ready to hear the million Jeopardy question. It could save a trip to the hospital.

Also, every team member that is going to use dangerous equipment should be properly trained by a mentor, weather or not they have used the machine prior to the current build season. People forget, or get careless... a refresher every now and then can't hurt. Train them, show them, Watch them. Be safe, don't rush, and get it done with all fingers and toes in tact.

[maltz1881]

Okay well I'm a little late on things...what happened to team 663?
I am sorry to say that Team 663 lost 1 of there mentors due to carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. I was asked to write an email on safety that went out to every coach, attached to my email was a statement saying that he had passed away on 2/10/06. Please keep his family and Team family in your thoughts and prayers

[rocketdawg3000]

Last week our team (845) had a mentor that cut his thumb half an inch deep using a band saw....it was pretty nasty

[CaseyKasem_1251]

Luckily we havent had anything too bad happen on our team but most recently we had a senior burn himself on the robot we had just had the frame welded in a few places and while carrying it back it was still very very hot and his wrist rubbed up against it, think it was a 2nd degree burn.

[pyroslev]

This thread is HUGE!

Back my Senior year (2003) for Stack Attack, on one of our MANY late nights in the Ag shop programming auto I swore the robot had it in for John while he was keeping the Programming cord from bring run over. I made one little change in the code that made the robot want to run him down... but the disable button saved him :-D.

To further that, ALL teams should have a disable button created and post someone at that button at all times during testing. It ought to be a MUST in your testing phase. Don't just use a switch, get one of those two position mushroom head stop buttons that you push in and pull out... and have them near it like they are getting ready to hear the million Jeopardy question. It could save a trip to the hospital.

Also, every team member that is going to use dangerous equipment should be properly trained by a mentor, weather or not they have used the machine prior to the current build season. People forget, or get careless... a refresher every now and then can't hurt. Train them, show them, Watch them. Be safe, don't rush, and get it done with all fingers and toes in tact.


Thanks for the publicity man!

[DHarris]

Well, I forgot to set the robot on some books before putting some autonomous codes in, and it took off towards me pretty quickly, but I was lucky enough to get out of the way with only a bruised hip from hitting the corner of a table. The robot itself has been getting pretty banged up lately though, with all the running into walls and lockers :p

[lil' kim]

one guy got knocked down and I got my foot ran over but other than that fairly uneventful.

[mancub1254]

2004 was our rookie year and our senior programmer was also our robot driver. We wernt at the competition 5 min. when he stabbed an X-acto knife through his palm. Keep in mind he was a programmer (typing) and our driver (operating joysticks). His face went pale and his eyes glazed as his cupped hand filled with blood. All we could get out of him was, " Close my laptop, close my laptop". just like a progammer.

[M Dawg1319]

It was not really an injurie but while trying to turn off our robot a team mate got hit in the face with a ball from our launcher going full speed :ahh:

[Marcel]

Today, I was drilling holes in this peice of lexan because our robot was overweight. So we were using a 1/2'' drill bit I believe and I was holding the peice down because it was a very large peice of lexan and we couldn't clamp it, anyways something happend and we went down too fast and it kind of twisted up and cut me in 3 different spots on my hand. One was very deep, and hurt like a mother but no big deal. Looks real cool too!

[Daru]

No major injuries so far in team 706. I seem to have cut myself lightly on something today, and yesterday... The biggest injury we had was not robot related at all... one of the frosh on the team decided it was a good idea to throw an aluminum rod. A shout, bleeding face, etc. The guy who was hit didn't come back this year. :(

Just one question... WHY DONT YOU PEOPLE PUT YOUR ROBOTS UP ON BLOCKS?!?!

[pyro20911d]

as of now..no...at competiton during all of the chaos, maybe

[Libby K]

oh wow does 1923 have some good injury stories.

january 7th: meeting at school after kickoff. we're opening the boxes...i hear...AHHHH!! turns out my friend "missed" the ziptie she was cutting...made a nice lil' slit down her finger with an exacto knife.

and then us just being dumb, and...for example, drilling the side of the lexan that was hanging over the EDGE of the table...

filing UPWARDS towards the face...

and, of course, playing with surgical tubing...

and, at NJ Regionals, a piece of lexan broke off in big sharp chunks...

we used them as awards...only i kept cutting myself on my MOST TEAM SPIRIT award.

oops. =/

[Gabe]

Has anyone noticed how funny it is that the safety award has a pretty sharp point? Honestly, I cannot understand why they don't sand that down or something...
The most serious accident, and the only one of three we have ever had (in two years), happened to me of all people. I was cutting a piece of PVC pipe with a hacksaw. Blade wasn't tensioned right, it jumped out of the cut, and then proceed to slice through my left thumb about an eight of an inch deep... :ahh: the worst that our machinist mentor said for one week I would not be able to use any power tools in his shop. Aw, man... :( The nesxt day a new rule was made that if you are doing any sawing (circular/reciprocating/jig/miter/band/hand/hack saw), you will wear leather gloves. If they do not, then I bite their heads off.

The irony of this story? I am the safety captain. :o

[Sharkbyte]

My motto: "That's why God gave us coagulation." :D

P.S. FYI, I have now been in Boy Scouts for eleven years. Finger nicks, along with most other minor injuries, no longer phase me. I know from experience that they will all (eventually) heal.

[Sharkbyte]

Has anyone noticed how funny it is that the safety award has a pretty sharp point? Honestly, I cannot understand why they don't sand that down or something...
The most serious accident, and the only one of three we have ever had (in two years), happened to me of all people. I was cutting a piece of PVC pipe with a hacksaw. Blade wasn't tensioned right, it jumped out of the cut, and then proceed to slice through my left thumb about an eight of an inch deep... :ahh: the worst that our machinist mentor said for one week I would not be able to use any power tools in his shop. Aw, man... :( The nesxt day a new rule was made that if you are doing any sawing (circular/reciprocating/jig/miter/band/hand/hack saw), you will wear leather gloves. If they do not, then I bite their heads off.

The irony of this story? I am the safety captain. :o

gloves=!!!!!!!!VERY BAD!!!!!!!!!!! (VERY BIG AND CONSPICOUS BAD)

only when using hand tools should you wear gloves
when working with power tools, you should never wear gloves, because if they get caught in a moving part, it will rip your hand off :eek:

[Rick TYler]

The nesxt day a new rule was made that if you are doing any sawing (circular/reciprocating/jig/miter/band/hand/hack saw), you will wear leather gloves. If they do not, then I bite their heads off.

It's not a bad idea for handsaws, but I would NEVER wear gloves around power tools that cut. The last thing I want is for a leather glove to bind on a table saw blade or router bit and pull my hand into the cutting edge. Ask a shop teacher, but I don't think any experienced person recommends wearing gloves around stationary cutting tools.

[sgsdragons]

I am the programmer on my team, and basically i was the one in control of the dongle. Well we were prototyping with the CMUcam and basically it was supposed to go really fast towards the light if the light was far away. Basically while i was holding onto the dongle, out mentor had the light on a cart and was standing a couple of feet from the robot (so the robot should go slowly towards him). I flipped the dongle out of disable and the camera found the light coming through the windows behind our mentor, and just plain ran our cart over. Thankfully I hit the disable switch before the robot reached our mentor who froze in his place.

[KTorak]

Does running over your foot with a cart that is about 350lbs with tools + a 130lb robot couunt? (actually...me, the HP, the coach, and the other driver did over the course of the weekend)

[ahirsch2589]

our battery came unplugged in the curie quaterfinals, getting beat by the highest score ever seen in aim high :(

[AdamC]

I got hit in the face 2 minutes ago by a flying piece of nylon space that broke off in the lathe. Thank FIRST for safety goggles. Still got a nasty stinging sensation in my face.

[heywuhjab]

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=679301

[RoboKid1566]

Just some bumps and bruises this year nothing big yet... its bound to happen with some people we have here.... lets hope not though:yikes: :D
so far I'm one of the main people who is part of safety we have to kinda yell at people to wear their goggles... i guess they will learn their lesson when the time comes and they get hurt doing something....:rolleyes:

[Éowyn]

Well, I broached my thumb today . . . I now have a nice little 1/8" chunk out of my left thumb. There was more blood than I would've thought. 'Twas kinda gross. :P

Moral of the story? Pay attention while broaching keyways. :cool:

[Blue_Mist]

I can't remember all the injuries. I just know that whenever we work on the drive train late at night, we end up with all of these mysterious cuts, blood and grease on our hands. My hands have almost one scar per square inch by now, just from two years of late night chain adjusting and competitions.

My most notable injury was when our 2005 bot still worked and we let a non-member drive it at a recruitment demo. He started spinning with a heavy PVC tetra, copying our competition driver, and didn't raise the arm high enough. The tetra flew off, missed my best friend, and hit me square on the mouth, leaving a bruise for a week. We have never let a non-member drive with tetras since. Poof balls and ringers, yes. Tetras, no.

[=Martin=Taylor=]

I can't remember all the injuries. I just know that whenever we work on the drive train late at night, we end up with all of these mysterious cuts, blood and grease on our hands. My hands have almost one scar per square inch by now, just from two years of late night chain adjusting and competitions.

My most notable injury was when our 2005 bot still worked and we let a non-member drive it at a recruitment demo. He started spinning with a heavy PVC tetra, copying our competition driver, and didn't raise the arm high enough. The tetra flew off, missed my best friend, and hit me square on the mouth, leaving a bruise for a week. We have never let a non-member drive with tetras since. Poof balls and ringers, yes. Tetras, no.

Lets not forget this humorous doozie. (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=549688#post549688)

[Blue_Mist]

Lets not forget this humorous doozie. (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=549688#post549688)

Oh, I remember it so well. It was last year; he has since graduated, but I was actually building something else at the time and only got to see the end result. He did stop by earlier in the season and inquire how things were going. Ironically enough, the '05 robot is actually the one in the background.

[Shivang1923]

got cut by metal, and a couple of bruises but nothing big

[purduephotog]

We did have an injury today. Apparently a student slipped outside in the ice and fell backwards while carrying a pizza.

Fortunately a number of other students witnessed the injury and rendered first aid- stabilizing the patient, assessing the damage, preventing further trauma, and finally, after determining the patient was OK, getting the patient up off the ground.

Into the team room they came, placing the immobilized victim on a table for further evaluation of the mentors. The mentors pronounced "Safe" and we all dug in to eat the pizza before it got any colder. There was some cheese damage to the top of the box but we let the vegetarian scrape it off.

About halfway through the students remembered Erik was still outside on the ground, so they went and brought him in too. A couple of Vault Cola's later and he was fine.

[Hiromi]

Well, funnily enough we have a phrase on our team; "pulling a Mladen". For example, I came close to losing a kidney with a jigsaw, and said "I almost just pulled a Mladen".

Last year, Mladen was using the drill press on a strip of steel, probably about 1mm thick, and instead of clamping it down deciding to hold on to it with bare hands. Well, the bit ripped the sheet out of his hand...or should I say through it? He came out with a significant amount of blood coming from his hands, having nearly severed two or three of his fingers. We still drill holes in sheet metal without vices for some reason...:confused:

[Bochek]

This year, there was an accident with a student and a lathe. She was working on the lathe, and while she was tightening the chuck, she forgot to take the chuck key out, and she also forgot to take her hand off the chuck key, before she turned the lathe on. she split her finger open almost all the way across, she lost her nail, and she broke the bone. she immedietly went to the hospital.

it is almost healed and she can help here and there now.



I have seen this happen, and it is not a pretty sight.

I almost did it once myself.

Hopefully she will recover fine.

- Bochek

[cgredalertcc]

Let me set the scene for you. A couple days into build season 1741 is working on an ingenious design to pickup the ball using a high volume vacuum. One of the captains (we have two) is using a makeshift cup made with about four inches of the top of a 5 gallon bucket and plywood plate to pick up the ball with an (extremely underpowered) 12 volt portable vacuum. Captain lifts ball vertically with the cup. No problem right? right. he then tries pivoting the ball up using the vacuum and at about forty five degrees from vertical he loses vacuum and the ball pops off. Well remember that whole for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction thing? The reaction in this case was him smacking himself with the plywood edge on the cup in his forehead. He hit himself hard enough that it made a cut in his forehead and he fell over.

I (because of the three stooges nature of the incident) began laughing hysterically and felt absolutely awful later on. It's too bad we don't have a video because it would be one of those things that you watch over and over and never cease to laugh when you see it.

[The Megan 2207]

It wasn't serious, but last year one of our team members (you know who you are, Stolte) drove the robot into my shins. We hadn't made bumpers yet and the temporary electrical board extended outside the chassis, so I had scraped, blackish-blue shins for a week or two.

[Otaku]

Resurrecting this thread with my own stupidity.

I was drilling some aluminium angle pieces for a quick mockup of our field. Had a hand-held dewalt power drill. My hair wasn't pulled back. Suddenly the power drill disappeared from my vision and the side of my head really, really hurt. Guess what happened?

To make things worse, I figured "put the drill in reverse and back it out slowly and there should be no issues". Finger twitches and the drill ends up jerking and hitting me in the head... again.

Took about 10 minutes for two of my teammates to get as much of my hair untangled as they could and cut the rest.

I ended up with two small open wounds on my left wrist (presumably where I had scraped against the vice) and a decently sized bald patch on the side of my head. The drill just ripped the hair clean out.


Previously mentioned drill-hair is now in a bag in our shop with one of my quotes ("If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is") written on it and it's hanging on the wall.

It was a good thing I had my safety glasses on -- upon further inspection, the drill bit nicked the lens right in front of my eye.

I had my hair pulled back constantly for the next few weeks and didn't go back into the shop for more than 5 or 10 minutes after that this year. Yes, it was THAT scary.

The moral of the story is (other than 'I am an idiot', anyways) make sure your hair is pulled back. always.

[ZInventor]

we were prototyping a ball-lift mechanism and needed to keep some string centered, so i suggested 16-gauge steel wire (art class stuff)...

later, while we were working, i was cutting a length of the wire off the spool, and it whipped back and tore my hand...

i was bleeding for a little bit, but luckily enough, it missed any major nerves, so it didn't hurt that bad.

i now have a permanent scar on the back of my hand, but that still hasn't convinced me to wear gloves in the shop...

however, i have good reason:

at the local community college, where i learned machine shop skills, one of the students (college) was wearing gloves while working on a lathe, and when he reached in to brush away a burr, it grabbed his hand and tore off three fingers.

now, he has a thumb and pinky, but no index, middle or ring finger.

he was rushed to the hospital, but they couldn't do anything since his gloves were covered in so much grease and dirt.

moral of the story:

NEVER wear gloves!!! (At PCC (the community college) you are now banned from wearing gloves unless you are changing a band saw blade.)

i know too many people with missing fingers to wear gloves, or brush away burrs with the machine running (i usually use burr-breaking cutters)

-Z

[Otaku]

words talking about a lathe injury
-Z

After getting my hair caught in a power drill, I've become increasingly more afraid of the lathe.

A power drill you can stop quickly.

A lathe, you can't.

[Wayne TenBrink]

In 2007 I was cutting a strip of 1/16 aluminum on the table saw. It got wedged between the fence and table, and kicked back. It hit me near the front pocket of my jeans (way too close...), cut through, bounced off me, and hit a student in the leg, where it also drew bit of blood. Other than a cut, large bump, and an ugly bruise, no permanent damage was done.

I saved the mangled piece of aluminum for safety show & tell.

[gorrilla]

the first day of our 2008 build season(monday after the kickoff)
We were cleaning and rearanging our basement/shop and someone(zach) unbolted the vice from the table without telling anyone-and I went to move the table and the vice fell off nearly "removing" my foot from my leg

[NorviewsVeteran]

Back in '07, it was myself and Jon, the team captain in the shop, and he was drilling a hole on the robot with a power drill. The bit jumped and grabbed his Tshirt, wrapping it up like spaghetti. After he got the bit out of his shirt, he went around and shook everybody's hand for just being there. I think he was a little drifty after the almost-incident.

[Ben Martin]

Our season went pretty smoothly in general in terms of safety, but I somehow managed to give myself a nasty cut from a polycord QuickConnect piece. The gash didn't go away for weeks.

[ZakuAce]

As usual, you can find traces of my blood on the drive train. Chains are SUCH a pain.

[quadrinim]

The team captain accidentally dropped a recently sharpened 1 inch endmill with the chuck on his foot it sliced through his pants, sock and ended up making a nice gash in his foot. He kept working until his parents (who are doctors) showed up and used some "glue stitch" to patch him up.

and i've cut, scratched and scraped myself almost once a day (most painfully I missed with the di-burring tool and sliced my middle finger) It happened so many times that we needed to buy more band-aids. :|

[Creator Mat]

we made it through the build season with the only injury of note being our electrical mentor slicing open his finger striping wire.

Then i sliced open my fingers moving regolith on a clean up day.

[FIRSTgirl675]

Last season I was making the bumpers for the robot, and we were using an industrial hot glue gun to stick the noodle to the plywood. Because it was used industrial, the glue was heated by a flame, and the glue gun had been on for a good period of time. While moving a bumper out of my way, the glue dripped off the bumper and onto my pinkie finger :ahh: . It was so hot I had to let the glue that was on my finger cool off before I could do anything otherwise I would have burned myself again. I ended up with a nice blister on the outside of my finger. It took a while to heal because ripped of the blister right after I burned myself because it hurt so bad, which caused it to ooze for the next week.

Other than that nothing bad has happened (just the usual cuts and bruises) besides a student getting his hair wrapped in a drill.

[big1boom]

I am pretty sure that I got the worst injury on the team, and all it was was a small cut on my knuckle.

[Flyin' Axe]

For some weird reasons our practice robot's PWMs were outputting very high voltages. This guy just wanted to touch the pins and he got a small piece of the pin embedded in his finger and the pin was completely burned! :O Luckily he was okay.

[Hanna2325]

one of the girls on our team has an arrow shaped scar on her arm from a burn. there have been others but that was the coolest.