Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr.Bot
For all of you at scrimmages and especially if you have a practice and real robot, yesterday there was a near disastrous accident at a scrimmage. A team enabling their main robot on the field of play forgot to disable their practice robot sitting on the pit table. The result of which the table robot flew off the table and landed on a student working in the next 'pit.' Fortunately there were no serious injuries, but it could have been much much worse.
We all should know by now that robots should only be enabled on the field, and robots on tables should be on blocks or have the battery removed. In my fifteen years as a mentor this is the scariest moment I've ever seen. Please exercise extreme caution as we have less then two days to go until the build ends. Nothing we do means anything if someone gets seriously hurt at a FIRST event.
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A scary lesson for sure. We've had our fair share of close calls in the past due to unintended robot operation, but this one sounds especially bad. I'm glad the student is ok. I'd like to reinforce the "up on blocks" idea, even without a battery. Robots are heavy, and someone might be pushing on a part of it causing it to roll off a table and do serious damage (to either the robot or people). We've had some close calls, but luckily quick reactions kept it from being bad.