were there robot related injuries on your team?

[Rob Colatutto]

In Houston while we were fixing our robot after a match, i was changing the battery which just happens to be under the arm, so we raised it all the way up while i changed the battery... after i put the new battery in someone bumped the table and our nice 25 pound arm came down on my head. Put me on the floor for a few minutes...

[Kristina]

Originally posted by DougHogg
2) Our telescoping arm this year has two motors. One raises the arm and the other rotates it.

Hmmm...I remember ducking from that arm 2x at the Chatsworth scrimmage when I was reff'ing with Sean. Sheesh, I thought I could avoid potential robotics related injuries by not being around during build season but apparently not because now I have other teams after me. I'm just kidding, no hard feelings.

[Specialagentjim]

Ahh! The arm robots! lol. Practice field at nationals, the one near robot registration and safety check; I'm standing over there, about 15-20 minutes before pits close, with a half-autonmous robot. We've got all the code for it done and we're setting the values (Run motor at x speed for y cycles). 108, along with about 10-15 other teams there, are all getting auton mode finished. Everyone is being about as arrogant as can be, including myself (regrettably), and total chaos has ensued there. For the most part, teams usually give a loud warning before running their robot, usually in the form of "GET OUT THE WAY, We're gonna run it!". Well, we really need our code working, so as I'm holder-of-the-almighty-tether for the moment, im standing behind the robot checking for that weird nosie it just made. Have I painted the picture of total chaotic environment yet? Heh, next I hear the team behind me say "Okay, we're gonna run it, look out". The thoughts in my head are, "alright...im not near the ramp, go ahead and run it, not anywhere near me". I don't however, realize that its an arm bot. They warn me about 2 more times, say "oh well, run it!". That arm comes flying at me, as I finally realize why they warned me. I duck with about a fraction of a second to spare, JUST avoiding it. lol, I was freaked for a second, laughed for another 2, then went back to our robot.

Anyone remember almost knocking out a 108 member? We've got white shirts with a dark blue top of the shirt, with a big pantehr on the front. At the time, someone from their team got a picture of it and offered to send it to me. I sorta was distracted by our robot, and didnt get his e-mail addy. Anyone have that pic? I'd love to have it


Injury-wise: 108 always has em, but we're also known for our "narrowly escaping" maneuvars. Now, we're a technology program at our high school, so none of us are in the greatest of shape. Now, imagine us, moving at speeds beyond we've ever moved, to avoid things flying at us. We've caught wings, drive trains, and various other things juss in the nick of time.


One more to add to this horrendously long post. Our robot, on start up, had a glitch for a while. This glitch would cause the robot on every start up to run the first cycle of autonmous (A glitch no one understood, but seemed to just "disappear" one day). Our mechanical engineer would, of course, be standing in front of the robot watching the drivetrain EVERY time we started it. Everytime it would jump foreward about 2-4 inchs and just about take him out....and evertime he'd look up and say "WHO DID THAT??". We'd then explain, for the nth time, that it was auton, and not us.

hehe...If I think of more, I'll post them..If I'm not banned by everyone for the length of this post. Yeahhh...

[Gena B.]

Some of the stories on this post are cracking me up!

I thought of a really good one dealing with the autonomous mode for our team this year.
We had a basic program that we were testing out at our playing field. A first-year volunteer on our team, fondly known as Uncle Gary, was helping some students... We connected the tether to the robot to load the program onto it, but when it was done, instead of us having time to unplug it, there was a slight glitch and it started moving as soon as it had the program. The lap top was still connected and was resting on top of one of the totes. But the program didn't work accurately at the time, and the robot started spinning around in circles. Hahaha- I can still see Uncle Gary grabbing the computer and chasing the robot around while everyone else scattered! Finally someone was able to turn the robot off and no one was hurt.

I don't remember any accidents happening where someone really got injured, we just have some pretty funny stories.

I have one more for you...
Last year, me and my friend were working on our robot's ball pick-up, and directly above us on a flight of stairs one of our engineers was standing talking to another adult. He wasn't paying attention and he accidentally dropped an open water bottle on our heads! It was actually really funny, because at first we didn't notice where it came from.. The other adults kept joking around with him about the students having to wear hard hats to work under him! Oh, good times!

[Willum]

Well, we had a constant fear of what was essentially a guillotine on this year's robot. then there were the arms that swung too fast and almost beheaded our electrical female. Of course the autonomous code managed to assault everything within reach.

[Ashley Weed]

I deffinately wasn't fond of making the dumb corner protectors to attach the lexan to this year. We used a really crappy sheet metal, and well.. in the process.. I was just carrying it once and walked over to the table to realize my thumb was gushing with blood.

Last year was even more dangerous... our goal grabber arms were pneumatic.... and well... there was a LOT of force behind them. I accidently rotated and closed an arm on my leg at a demo.. and well.. there is still noticeable damage when I'm playing soccer

[Ryan Foley]

yeah, so apparently with our control system:
when you disable the bot when the wings are out, it brings the wings back in (piston powered wings to be specific). Then, when you enable it again (assuming power hasnt been cut off to either the OI or RC) the wings pop out again.

I kinda forgot about that minor detail.

got nailed right below the knee with one of the wings.

And I know its not robot related, but its still funny.
One of my fellow team members was trying to knock a welded piece off of our robot using a rubber mallet. He kind of let go at the end of his swing and the rubber hammer flew 20ft and hit me about an inch from my heart.

I ran when he said "what about a sledge hammer?"

[R Bohannan]

[quote]Originally posted by Greg Perkins
[b]this year, we share a build area with team 166.
well they had a prototype drive system set up for their auto and gearboxs. our robot, 151 was lying in pieces on the opposite end of our makeshift playing field. well 5 minutes before, 166 setup thier robot backwards and it drove into our driver. well, to say the least...he wasnt very happy...anyway..
well they set it up in the correct position for another try at it, and somehow, the code got reversed, so hte bot drove striaight backwards. so we are working quietly on the bot, when WHAM!!
the robot hits tyler again, and he grabs the robot and flips it over, thinking that it will go the other way...
well their auto mode at that point did the opposite thing IT CAME BACK AT TYLER AGAIN, its like it wouldnt stop! classic


Greg - the amazing thing about your story is that the robot wasn't in autonomous mode - I was driving it......

[Veselin Kolev]

Here's a way to get plenty of robot injuries...
If you used sensors to locate and destroy stacks and did it fairly well...
You can have games of seek and destroy. Buy some of that reflective tape and stick it onto people's ankles...
And if you have a fast robot, and if they don't realize they have the tape on, you can get some good laughs. Just don't do this without an intelligent person at the kill switch. Don't want anybody to get hurt.

As for the injuries, once while cutting some bars with a radial arm saw, the brushes started sparking like crazy and burnt me.
At Silicon Valley regionals, I was drilling mounting holes in our plexi-glass side panels and the drill got my finger, and it was really deep, like a 1/4 inch deep. It didn't bleed too much though.
And our pneumatics are sort-of spontaneous, and our extending elevator got a guy working on it pretty hard.

[Aignam]

Not quite robot related, but while building a practice ramp after the release of the Stack Attack game, I was nailing something in place and my foot hit an easel that had been propped up against the wall. The easel started falling towards a student who had been nailing another piece in, someone yelled heads up, so naturally, the student turned his head upwards, and got scraped right along the bridge of the nose with the top of the easel. It was all fun and games afterwards, but it left a mark for a month or so that I had to deal with everytime I saw the particular student.

[josh_johnson]

I think total over the season I got hit with the wings about a dozen times. However, the funniest of these was before we slowed down the speed of the wings and we were testing out our autonomous code. I was trying to get the robot to correctly follow the line and forgot about the part of the code that caused the wings to drop. One of the wings, of course, hit me right on top of the head. The person driving at the time frantically tried to raise the wings, but hit the button once too many times and smacked me in the head again after raising them. Then after raising the wings, he unplugged the OI causing the wings to revert to the default state which at that time was down. So I managed to get smacked in the head by the wings three times in about 5 seconds.

[Andrew S]

We were testing the auton mode on our robot out in the parking lot of the school, and we had the robot on tether. My teammate was holding the cord too close to the robot and when the robot went to turn he pulled it a bit, just enough to have the robot headed straight for him. Needless to say he went running and the robot got the best of him

[Joe Matt]

My favorite injury to a team mate happened during a strategy session.

It involved a box, a freshman, and a broken nose.

[Ryan Dognaux]

I got an injury at IRI... but it really wasn't robot related. Somehow during the HP competition I cut my hand on a piece of container... funny, you'd think I'd get injured by the robot

[Tytus Gerrish]

the bolt that did this whizzed over the heads of 4 engineers, Was this tytus's Fault?.... YES!, Did he learn his lesson?... (Do not Launch Steel bolts out of Pnewmatic Projectile weapons inside the shop) YES!