Demonstration lessons learned/safety

FIRST General Forum
1

With a very minor incident today, thought I’d start a thread about safety when showing off our robots in public. We had a demonstration today, and were shooting our discs down the road…and our students missed catching one disc, the disc skittered along the asphalt, and went into a drainage sewer. Oops.

I emailed the public works people at the establishment, and they had it retrieved within the hour. End result was a minor inconvenience for public works. (Ok, not much…their building was literally within 30 yards of the sewer opening.) But, if I had not asked them to retrieve it, rain could have washed it down the pipe, clogging the pipe, and causing either a minor flood, and or a very serious maintenance issue. And those are serious costs, indeed.

After the disc went into the sewer, we fired the rest of the discs into a grass area, and the kids at the demo had just as much fun as before.

Lesson: Be absolutely sure that your disc can’t go skittering into a sewer. A spinning disc on asphalt behaves like water, flowing to the lowest point…which is usually a sewer opening.

2

Safety is especially a concern when demonstrating old robots as parts break and fly off more easily. Especially 3D printed parts. For instance, when we were demonstrating our Rebound Rumble bot at a sponsor event, some custom pillow blocks, which were stressed from the previous season, cracked and fell off. Later that same day, the velcro on the radio gave way, the tether caught in the wheel and snapped in seconds. It’s also usually a good idea to turn off autonomous before demos, it usually doesn’t look good when you have to e-stop it before it runs someone over :rolleyes: ::safety::

3

Better that then hitting someone close-range in the head!

4

Before Rebound Rumble, my team was demonstrating the Logomotion bot at a school assembly when the arm broke off the bot. No one was hurt, but it certainly had the potential. ::ouch::