Remote Kill Switch

[Ozuru]

Originally Posted by jvriezen

An even better safety approach is a 'dead man' switch. This requires a person to continuously hold a switch in the pressed position for the robot to operate. Of course you couple this with a policy that you never jerry rig the switch to be held other than by a human watching the robot.

Basically every push lawn mower has one of these on the handle, and every riding lawnmower has a seat switch that does the same thing (at least when the blades are spinning.)

Update: Clarification: I agree, driving in the pits is not appropriate. My suggestion above is more for driving in the shop and could even apply to driving on a practice field, which is more danger prone than a real field. Seems like it would be a good idea to have a driver station setting that allows you to invert the space bar, and require that it be pressed when enabling and result in a kill if released while enabled.

I kind of feel that a dead man's switch is kind of extreme for something that already has so many security precautions into place. I wouldn't trust myself with a dead man's switch that would deactivate our robot during the match due to the simple fact that accidents happen and if, for some reason, one would happen during the match, we have the ability to 1) slam the spacebar or 2) press the giant emergency stop button.