Near-death experiences or injuries during build season?

[EricH]

I've seen a robot, before the programming was fixed (and yes, this was a programming problem), try to decapitate event staff. No, it wasn't my team's robot.

This was back in 2003, when this whole "autonomous" thing first started. This particular robot had a rather long, rather quickly rotating arm that would telescope out autonomously, swing in a half-circle or so, raise to vertical to retract back and lock, and then stow itself for the rest of the match while the robot started driving. There was just one problem...

The code didn't work quite like that at the local preship scrimmage. It had the telescoping out part down pretty well, but the whole "half-circle" part was still being tweaked, along with the timing of starting to drive and the ability to retract. This >10' aluminum arm comes swinging outside the field border, rather wildly, and for whatever reason it's swinging just about right at the head ref and the MC, who have to duck and jump. Even field reset had to jump back a time or two. After two matches of that, that part of the autonomous was disabled until they could prove it worked.

The good news is the team in question didn't do that at the regionals--they'd gotten the code under control by then.