Safety Issue: Robots Moving in Pits

[robochick1319]

I brought this up in another thread and it was recommended that it become it's own topic so here it is.

I have a major concern about teams running/driving/powering on their robots in the pit. There are 3 places where a robot is turned on and enabled: the practice field, the team's pit, and the competition field. When the robot is on and enabled in the pit, it should be on blocks of some kind that prevent the wheels from touching the ground.

My team had serious safety incident at a regional when another team was "practicing driving" with their robot in the pit directly across from us, lost control, and literally ran one of our mentors over. It was reported and dealt with but the story doesn't end there. It's been a few years and I STILL see teams running their robots on the pit floor, intentionally or not.

It is particularly alarming to me since I see children and disabled visitors in the pit area who could be greatly injured by a rampaging robot and couldn't easily run away.

Has anyone noticed this safety issue? Any ideas of what can we do as a community to raise awareness of it?

(Also, this is my first time every starting a thread. That's how much I care about this. Yikes )

[thatprogrammer]

To keep it safe, we run our robot (if we ever need to at the pits) in our cart, which has slots for the robot's wheels, so it doesn't drive out of the cart. To raise awareness, I would recommend suggesting to the pit administration at your regional to announce not to run robots in the pits on the floor.

I'd say that, like the last thread about safety, the only answer to this is to use common sense, and that the correct form of action is based on a case by case scenario. Everyone tests their robot systems while in the pits, usually to a smaller extent due to pit sizing, but everyone does it nonetheless. It's essential to getting things working. Testing is part of the engineering process (and this is an engineering competition after all). However every once in a while, like you mentioned, someone doesn't think (or doesn't know), and does something that ultimately results in an injury - either to themselves, or to someone else. Are these actions a danger? Yes. Should the mistakes of a few penalize everyone else who does these practices safely? I'd say not.

Throwing rules at the problem won't make people more safe - it'll just make more people rule-breakers. The best solution is to create a culture that respects safety and is well-educated on its finer points. Safe practices and common sense should be the norm, not the outlier. Set it as the default standard that everyone should be held to. Don't parade around a team and give them a safety award for doing what everyone should be doing already. I'm being realistic here: The average team gives 0 fluffs about the safety award. Why? Because it's not an achievement - it's a standard. Teams shouldn't be celebrated for being safe in the same way students shouldn't be celebrated for doing their homework - it's what they're supposed to do. The more safety is celebrated as "special" and treated as "outside the norm", the more it's going to become so.

If you're serious about safety, straighten up, buckle down, and make a culture within your team and your community where safe practices are expected and respected, not celebrated.

[robochick1319]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence

If you're serious about safety, straighten up, buckle down, and make a culture within your team and your community where safe practices are expected and respected, not celebrated.

I agree with you on many points. My team takes safety very seriously but as my incident shows it doesn't matter how safe we are if those working in our area make blatantly wrong and unsafe decisions. Especially when they do these things after being told they are unsafe and even seeing that they are unsafe.

Maybe FIRST can't make a solid rule in the manual. Maybe volunteers could just go around enforcing the "no testing the robot on the floor of the pit" rule just like they enforce the safety glasses rule. The only way it will become a standard is if we start addressing it like a standard.

[FrankJ]

Do realize if Flash (OP) is at a competition, they pretty much win the safety award. They do it without being obtrusive to other teams. If you are testing your robot in the pits, you need to be ready for unexpected actions (why else would you test?). This needs to drilled into anybody enabling a robot in the pits. Be sure to tie their hair back first.

[eedoga]

Hey,

I think we (Some of us, not all) do stupid things in the name of desperation. A lot of it stems from thinking that if we just do X then it will all be alright.

I have gotten to volunteer as a safety advisor for the past few years. I have seen some crazy things in the name of desperation. There is also the "we do this all the time" factor to consider.

So...What I suggest? If you see someone doing something unsafe, politely ask them to stop the behavior. If they don't respond reasonably, then go to a mentor...If that doesn't work then get a safety advisor and let them know...

I hope this helps more than it hurts...

Edoga

[SousVide]

I could only surmise (not to excuse them or the behavior) that the situation OP described were b/c that team was "in a hurry"; why would it be ok to have the wheels in contact with the floor within the pit.

wood blocks, painted in team colors and stenciled with logo or team#, handed out at the events ?

[xXhunter47Xx]

Our robot cart has the robot sit on blocks and it's secured via bungee cords so it's safe to run as long as it's on the cart and is clear of people.

We take safety very seriously. It's not really even a discussed thing, it's just kind of a common knowledge unspoken rule. Anything that poses an immediate threat means safety glasses, tied up hair (haha nobody has long hair but for the sake of safety), situational awareness, and anyone who is not working with the tool is required to stand a safe distance away or back into the room (we drag our large power tools outside the classroom, so if you're not working outside you're inside).

We did have an incident where a new student (who wanted to join mid-way through build season) used the belt sander with a kitchen mitt (one that's not owned by the team, nonetheless) and got a serious talk with everyone on the team.

I digress, from what I've noticed teams at the SD Regional 2014 have robot carts that lift the wheels off any points of contact and then is run when clear.
It was also made fairly clear that any robot operation would be done at the practice field, and luckily for us we were 20 feet away from the practice field so it wasn't that big of a deal to us.
But it was very clear that the robot shouldn't be run in the pit without it blocked up properly.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence

I'd say that, like the last thread about safety, the only answer to this is to use common sense, and that the correct form of action is based on a case by case scenario. Everyone tests their robot systems while in the pits, usually to a smaller extent due to pit sizing, but everyone does it nonetheless. It's essential to getting things working. Testing is part of the engineering process (and this is an engineering competition after all). However every once in a while, like you mentioned, someone doesn't think (or doesn't know), and does something that ultimately results in an injury - either to themselves, or to someone else. Are these actions a danger? Yes. Should the mistakes of a few penalize everyone else who does these practices safely? I'd say not.

Throwing rules at the problem won't make people more safe - it'll just make more people rule-breakers. The best solution is to create a culture that respects safety and is well-educated on its finer points. Safe practices and common sense should be the norm, not the outlier. Set it as the default standard that everyone should be held to. Don't parade around a team and give them a safety award for doing what everyone should be doing already. I'm being realistic here: The average team gives 0 fluffs about the safety award. Why? Because it's not an achievement - it's a standard. Teams shouldn't be celebrated for being safe in the same way students shouldn't be celebrated for doing their homework - it's what they're supposed to do. The more safety is celebrated as "special" and treated as "outside the norm", the more it's going to become so.

If you're serious about safety, straighten up, buckle down, and make a culture within your team and your community where safe practices are expected and respected, not celebrated.

I recognize that many times the safety award isn't necessarily awarded for great reason, and/or it's not clear to other teams why the award was given. The definition of the award, from the rulebook, is "Celebrates the team that progresses beyond safety fundamentals by using innovative ways to eliminate or protect against hazards." Personally, I think that's a great goal - we're going beyond the basic safety stuff that every team should do (but that many forget about, thus threads like these) and celebrating teams that are actually role models for the rest of FIRST when it comes to safety. The problem we have is that often judges are "wowed" by the "safety theater" that many teams put on at events, and they miss the cool stuff that teams might do that isn't just for show.


As for the OP, if you see a team being unsafe in any regard, grab one of the UL Safety Advisors (they wear the green shirts), and clearly describe to them what you saw and what your concerns are. The Safety Advisors can then approach the team and talk to them about safe practices and hopefully get the point across.

[who716]

Originally Posted by robochick1319

I brought this up in another thread and it was recommended that it become it's own topic so here it is.

I have a major concern about teams running/driving/powering on their robots in the pit. There are 3 places where a robot is turned on and enabled: the practice field, the team's pit, and the competition field. When the robot is on and enabled in the pit, it should be on blocks of some kind that prevent the wheels from touching the ground.

My team had serious safety incident at a regional when another team was "practicing driving" with their robot in the pit directly across from us, lost control, and literally ran one of our mentors over. It was reported and dealt with but the story doesn't end there. It's been a few years and I STILL see teams running their robots on the pit floor, intentionally or not.

It is particularly alarming to me since I see children and disabled visitors in the pit area who could be greatly injured by a rampaging robot and couldn't easily run away.

Has anyone noticed this safety issue? Any ideas of what can we do as a community to raise awareness of it?

(Also, this is my first time every starting a thread. That's how much I care about this. Yikes )

i feel its more important to just notice what going on around you and be aware of it so you know if something is going to go wrong. my old English teacher from high-school once said be respectful Responsible and safe with safety 3rd as if your 1 and 2 the 3rd will fallow suit.

this year specifically it is hard with the pit size and the robot size to not be completely 100% safe but if you notify the people around you to be on alert you should be fine..

as someone who is generally unsafe at work etc. in my personal opinion and I know many of you are gonna hate on it but I think safety is taken way to seriously in first and personally I would advocate it too loosen up some will that ever happen absolutely not. I think safety tends to scare people into not trying something new because of all the caution around it, im perfectly healthy with all my body parts still and i have done some unsafe practices at work.

Originally Posted by robochick1319

I agree with you on many points. My team takes safety very seriously but as my incident shows it doesn't matter how safe we are if those working in our area make blatantly wrong and unsafe decisions. Especially when they do these things after being told they are unsafe and even seeing that they are unsafe.

Maybe FIRST can't make a solid rule in the manual. Maybe volunteers could just go around enforcing the "no testing the robot on the floor of the pit" rule just like they enforce the safety glasses rule. The only way it will become a standard is if we start addressing it like a standard.

I know your team is safe (Flash is one of the great role models in safety) - I'm saying this is something the community needs to do. It's a culture that needs to be made and respected by everyone. There doesn't need to be rules against potentially dangerous things (like testing in the pits) if the potential for danger is removed from the equation by everyone executing safe practices. I love testing my robot on the floor of the pit - it is a quick and easy way to make testing game object collection and small driving tests more reliable and realistic to being on a field, and as long as I am taking the right precautions in regards to the safety of myself, my team, and those around me, I see no reason why I should be required to not test as I please. The same applies for everyone else. Like I said - it's a case by case scenario. If Johnny Teammember is doing some unsafe testing, maybe the pit safety advisers can take away his team's privileges of testing in the pit until they understand how to correctly and safely test, but there's still no reason why everyone else should be punished because of the actions of a minority group of people.

You are right that the only way it will become a standard is by addressing it as one, and the proper way to do so is to educate everyone on the correct way of action instead of punishing everyone for something they didn't do.

[robochick1319]

I'm glad to see that there are so many people out there who recognize this safety issue. And you are all absolutely right: politely reminding teams and reporting issues to the UL Safety Judges are the ways to handle it. I'm just dreaming of a time in FIRST when running the robot on the pit floor cause you want to go for a "test drive" will be as obviously wrong as wearing open toed shoes and no safety glasses in the pit.

[Oromus]

I think that there shouldn't necessarily be a rule against testing in the pit, with or without blocks. If a team is testing their robot unsafely (i.e. running autonomous, drive testing, ect...), someone should be told (i.e. a mentor or safety inspector). However, testing your robot on the floor alone shouldn't be considered unsafe or be against the rules. In some cases, like the mentioned incident of a neighboring team running over a mentor with a robot, teams testing their robot on the pit floor have gone about it unsafely. Some teams, however, make sure to safely test their robot when in the pits. For example, we needed to test our automatic tote stacking button. To do that, we put our robot on the pit floor and ran it. However, we made sure before hand that driving was completely disabled. The worst our robot could do is move it's lift. I think IF a rule should be made/actually enforced about robot operation in the pits, it should be preventing robots from driving on the floor of the pits; that's what seems to be really unsafe.

TL;DR: I think robots being active on the floor of pits are fine; just don't drive or have driving enabled.

[xXhunter47Xx]

Originally Posted by Oromus

TL;DR: I think robots being active on the floor of pits are fine; just don't drive or have driving enabled.

Here's the thing though,
you can't visibly tell if a team has disabled drive. I don't doubt you or your team's skill to disable code, but some teams aren't as savvy or experienced with FRC programming. If this is introduced, it only takes one incident (See the OP's) to instantly ban it again. It's safer to just not allow it to be run on the ground at all.

TL;DR it only takes one bad apple etc etc.

[SousVide]

One of the issues that I've seen is that the operator on it (we were in the practice field at the time) mistakenly left the DS with autonomous selected. The driver enabled the robot and it took off. Had we been in the pits, it would been on the blocks and wouldn't have actually gone anywhere. Do we double-check that the DS is in the intended mode ? Yes. Will someone make a mistake - it's still a possibility.

We make checklists for a lot of things that we do - but for some reason, the majority of the teenagers/young-adults despises checklists; it takes them a year and a half to get warmed up to the idea. So, we have checklists, and there are angry eyes every time that I make them use it.

Having said that, if we are doing anything other than running the drive wheels while we are in the pit, we let our neighbors know so that they know to be ready if we start yelling.