It'd be nice if, one day, people just concentrated on how to inspire your own team and your own community. Let others decide on how to inspire theirs. - George1902 [more]
There is a concept of a "heartbeat". I believe it goes something like this: if your code does not return from periodic after a certain amount of time, the system presumes your code has crashed and disables all motors.
While loop can take too long to execute and trigger the fail safe.