Important Safety Incident Notice

For all of you at scrimmages and especially if you have a practice and real robot, yesterday there was a near disastrous accident at a scrimmage. A team enabling their main robot on the field of play forgot to disable their practice robot sitting on the pit table. The result of which the table robot flew off the table and landed on a student working in the next 'pit.' Fortunately there were no serious injuries, but it could have been much much worse.

We all should know by now that robots should only be enabled on the field, and robots on tables should be on blocks or have the battery removed. In my fifteen years as a mentor this is the scariest moment I've ever seen. Please exercise extreme caution as we have less then two days to go until the build ends. Nothing we do means anything if someone gets seriously hurt at a FIRST event.

[MechEng83]

Originally Posted by Dr.Bot

For all of you at scrimmages and especially if you have a practice and real robot, yesterday there was a near disastrous accident at a scrimmage. A team enabling their main robot on the field of play forgot to disable their practice robot sitting on the pit table. The result of which the table robot flew off the table and landed on a student working in the next 'pit.' Fortunately there were no serious injuries, but it could have been much much worse.

We all should know by now that robots should only be enabled on the field, and robots on tables should be on blocks or have the battery removed. In my fifteen years as a mentor this is the scariest moment I've ever seen. Please exercise extreme caution as we have less then two days to go until the build ends. Nothing we do means anything if someone gets seriously hurt at a FIRST event.

A scary lesson for sure. We've had our fair share of close calls in the past due to unintended robot operation, but this one sounds especially bad. I'm glad the student is ok. I'd like to reinforce the "up on blocks" idea, even without a battery. Robots are heavy, and someone might be pushing on a part of it causing it to roll off a table and do serious damage (to either the robot or people). We've had some close calls, but luckily quick reactions kept it from being bad.

[rsegrest]

I agree. We had a similar incident this year but were extremely fortunate.

Our robot was on the cart and the programmers wanted to test some new code. They loaded the code and enabled the robot without double-checking to make sure it was on blocks. The result was a bent frame on our practice bot as it launched off the cart and hit the floor. Thank goodness no one was in front of it.

Needless to say our programmers no longer just trust that the other team members put the robot on blocks.