were there robot related injuries on your team?

[Winged Wonder]

during my freshman year, after helping wire GhettoBot, i decided to plug in a batter to see if any of my wiring actually worked the way it was supposed to. well, i didnt bother to check if the switch was on for some odd reason (which it turns out it was) so while i was sitting on the top of a table with our little wooden robot, i moved to plug in the battery and suddenly there was this sparkly flash! thankfully i didnt get hurt, nor did a friend of mine who just so happened to be walking past me at that time... but needless to say, i was banned from plugging in batteries for the rest of the build season.

at robot demos we generally let children drive the robot for a little (with guidance)... well.. generally bad things happen when we allow kids to extend our arm all the way (11 feet, mind you), because once its extended, they feel the need to move the arm, putting everyone in an 11 foot radius in danger, since when you move the arm just barely, it puts the center of gravity out of whack, and things come down, fast. thankfully no one has been hurt, but the first time i drove Roccobot 2k4 at a demo i was banned from being the arm operator because i had a bad habit of coming waaay to close to spectators. at a recent demo there was this specifically rambunxious little boy who wanted to try base driving, so i figured why not, as long as i had my hands on the controls as well it wouldnt be that big of a deal... NOT. the second i said "sure" he grabbed the controls before i could yell "watch out" to those standing by out pit crew chief who was explaining something about the robot by the robot at the time, and we ran into her ^^; shes okay, no real battle scars, but at nationals last year, she did scare us all in the stands when she held up a bloody rag. she hadnt gotten hurt by the robot, just had a freak-of-nature nosebleed, but we had a running joke that she got in a fight with one of the other teams.

none of those are really injuries though.. but this one is. this past build season while i was doing driving practice with our current human player (originally we had planned to try out to become the pink team's first female drive team, she being base driver and i tower operator) we had our human-player wannabe's run around doing Field Reset. we only had about 2 or 3 PVC tetras at a time on average (although we started off with more, while i was learning how to drive, i managed to break most of them by being less than gentile hand having a bad habit of dropping them) so our human player(s) would run around collecting the tetras as soon as we stacked them and placing them on our ghetto automated tetra station. well, one day, while our extremely hyper and impatient HP-wannabe was grabbing for a tetra immidiately after Maia and i had stacked it on top of a goal, he got swiped across the chest by our hook, because unfortuantly Maia had turned in the direction directly towards him, not away from him. he got a huge scrape across his chest (through his shirt!) from it, and although we felt bad, it still was kind of his fault for coming for the tetra on the same side as the goal as the robot.. hence we made the rule: Go to the opposite side of a goal to retrieve a tetra! ...and you can obviously see why neither of us ended up as drivers this year.


...on a random note... there are a lot of wing-related injuries! be careful everyone! you are not immortal!