[KenWittlief]

this year - when our human player forgot to set the L/R switch for autonmode - the bot turned the wrong way and SLAMMED into the railing right in front of the judges table (our bot top speed is about 12mph)

a piece of the front (Skyway) wheel came off and hit one of the judges - we hit the railing so hard the robot controller reset, so auton mode started over again, backed up about 10 feet, turned right, and headed for the opponents player station at full speed.

Slammed into that so hard it left a 2 foot long gouge in the plexiglass wall.

We had talked about testing our robot, for robustness, before we shipped it, by running it full speed into a brick wall. We never actually ran that test, until the above mentioned incident at Buckeye.

Another scary moment - when we were testing auton mode at our site before shipping, and a stack of containers was knocked over, into the two containers on which my ThinkPad was sitting (holding ALL our SW on its harddrive - not backed up anywhere else).

The LCD was half knocked out of the laptop - took me half an hour to put the laptop backtogether. THEN I got the floppy drive out and backed up all my files - Figure I would NOT get a third chance :c)