Robot Demos and Ultimate Ascent

[ENeyman]

Today Team 3929, the Atomic Dragons, had a booth at the annual Philly Science Festival, an outside Carnival featuring over 150 booths from local high schools, colleges, and companies. This was our second year attending the event. Last year was great: we set up an interactive robot demo where kids could roll the basketballs into our intake and we would shoot them back out for them to catch.

This year however, we were faced with an issue. Because of the dangerous nature of shooting frisbees, we were not allowed to shoot them during demonstrations. We could still drive around and explain our mechanisms, but it was a little disappointing that we couldn't fully demonstrate our robot's abilities.

So, my question is how have other teams done robot demos safely? How do you overcome the safety hazard in order to chuck firsbees at high speeds?

[JB987]

Don't chuck disks at high speeds? Pretty easy to program much slower wheel speeds to reduce the exit velocity of the disks so they only go a few feet. The question is, how much room do you have to work with? If space isn't much of an issue and you can cordon off a big enough area you wouldn't need to dial back the velocity...

[z_beeblebrox]

At a demo we did outside a library, we were fine shooting at nearly full speed (We can shoot full court) and gave the kids ~50ft away a great time catching discs. There were no safety problems for us.