Demonstration lessons learned/safety

[Pendulum^-1]

With a very minor incident today, thought I'd start a thread about safety when showing off our robots in public. We had a demonstration today, and were shooting our discs down the road...and our students missed catching one disc, the disc skittered along the asphalt, and went into a drainage sewer. Oops.

I emailed the public works people at the establishment, and they had it retrieved within the hour. End result was a minor inconvenience for public works. (Ok, not much....their building was literally within 30 yards of the sewer opening.) But, if I had not asked them to retrieve it, rain could have washed it down the pipe, clogging the pipe, and causing either a minor flood, and or a very serious maintenance issue. And those are serious costs, indeed.

After the disc went into the sewer, we fired the rest of the discs into a grass area, and the kids at the demo had just as much fun as before.

Lesson: Be absolutely sure that your disc can't go skittering into a sewer. A spinning disc on asphalt behaves like water, flowing to the lowest point....which is usually a sewer opening.