Prompted by some folks citing this as a physical risk in the Clippard explosion thread, rather than allowing that to derail addressing that safety risk, let’s have the discussion of how we can improve the safety of loading robots onto and off the field of play.
What I think teams should do:
Start using handles or rope loops! Stop carrying by bumpers (which often are not properly secured). Stop contorting your hands to get a grip your frame behind your bumpers. Stop using underhand grips to grab beneath your frame/bumper. Using handles or rope loops allows for a more secure grip. Rope loops can also allow for multiple individuals of varying heights to all comfortably lift the robot together.
For the past two seasons, 1712 has had a 1/4"-20 eyebolt near each corner of the robot, and then clipped a carabiner with a rope loop onto each of those for lifting the robot and carrying it on/off the cart or field. It made carrying our robots dramatically easier than in the past. The only downside we’ve had is that you can’t place your robot onto the cart quite as precisely (but we updated our cart design to be more tolerant of this). I highly suggest this practice to other teams.
What I think FIRST should do:
Make the field gates wider. Wider gates can allow for students to more comfortably load robots on/off the field without having to ensure their bumper zone is above the field perimeter, and potentially open the possibility for 3+ individuals to be involved in carrying robots. Moreover, it ties into my next bullet point, as well.
EXPLICITLY allow teams to roll their carts onto and off the field. Don’t make it mandatory, but make it an option for teams who wish to minimize the distance they have to carry their robots. I’m sure we can implement some common-sense solutions or regulations to make sure they don’t destroy the field carpet in the process.
What other actions can teams take in the current system to make carrying robots safer?
What other ways can the design of the FRC field or the process be updated to making loading robots safer?
I’m going to say “no” on this one–I don’t think “field carpet damage” is a primary reason. Copy-pasting from my post in the other thread:
Don’t get me wrong, I think that there may be a place for carts on the field. And making it an option (rather than mandatory) may be helpful. See my last line–shove the cart through the gate, grab the robot off of it, get the cart out of there would eliminate the rail navigation while still leaving most of the field open.
Handles, 3 carriers, and practice are the other things I’ve seen that really help.
Forgive me, but all of these seem pretty easy to solve, save for widening the field gates, which could be prohibitively expensive. Overcrowding is already a problem when you have people bumbling around trying to place a 125lb+battery+bumper robot in a specific part of the field. At least with a cart they could see where they’re going. I also think that avoiding these tricky situations has the potential to make the time delay actually lower than the existing method.
5 and 6 are barely even real. Swerve drives are demolishing fields faster than the most destructive cart ever could. Forgetting a cart, while probable, is at most a very low risk that would probably just fill the 3 minute WiFi connection void that occurs before each match.
That list of potential issues makes me feel more positive about a change to the robot loading rules.
We always have whoever is carrying the robot (at competition or at our shop) wear gloves and use handle loops that hook into the robot.
As a bonus we made the handle loops a specific length that also was the distance from the fender to our bumper for our 3 ball auto to make it easy to line up.
Would like to see the current guidance/rules changed to explicitly allow putting bumpers on the robot after it is on the field. It would shrink the footprint and lower the weight a bit for transport.
The number of times we have been told not to do it is very high and it takes us about 15-30s to put them on. The time and backs saved would be worth it.
Also, removing the bumpers to take the robot off the field.
I support allowing carts into the field, but another concern is the ramp crossing the gate. Many carts either have too small wheels or too high cg to navigate that safely. We might see a lot of tipped carts if we try, making the accident rate higher, rather than lower. Would it require on-field cart rules and inspections?
There’s simply no way carts will do more damage to the carpeting than the robots do, if this is the reason preventing carts on the field it’s a ridiculous one.
At one match at IRI there was a pit team member helping to lift the robot off of the field who almost tripped carrying it which could have been disastrous for that person or their carrying partner. I’m sure it’s happened before and I’ve just never seen or noticed it, but when I did it struck me that it’s ludicrous to disallow the carts onto the field.
Putting aside carts on the field, we always require good handles on our robots for safety. I don’t think FIRST can have a similar mandate without a lot of complicated new rules, but maybe they can add a bit in the manual encouraging handles, and showing some example pictures?
There are benefits to a wider gate than just taking the cart onto the field. A wider gate makes it easier to walk through with a robot. It lets you set the robot on the ground before pushing it through the gate. It could simplify a lot, but across such a large number of fields it could be very expensive.
Not sure, does this mean forgetting a cart on the field? That would get noticed pretty quickly, unlike the giant wrench that 1477 (Texas Torque of course!) uses as a team flag / object that almost got forgotten up against the alliance wall one match by the emcee. The match was an a heartbeat away from starting before someone noticed, a cart would be orders of magnitude more obvious.
The gate is definitely not wide enough for people to safely carry a robot through if they are on the sides of it. I’ve seen students trip and the robot fall on top of them and pin them down because of this issue. At least once medical staff was involved.
The other issue is that at many venues, there is not space to lift the robot off the cart and still have space to turn 90 degrees and/or walk a couple feet before carrying it through the gate. A lot of teams will pull their cart right up to the gate and try to lift it off the cart, maneuver it through the gate and put it on the field all in one awkward action.
Finally, the robots are too heavy. In industry, nobody routinely manually lifts anything half the weight of the robot. For anything over 50 lbs, they have some kind lifting apparatus, or break it down into pieces under 50lb. With battery and bumpers, an FRC robot can be 153 lbs. We are asking high school kids to lift up to 76.5 lbs. It’s not smart, and not safe. I would be in favor of the weight limit being reduced by 5, or possibly even 10 pounds to put us closer to a safe and sane lifting weight.
Since I don’t have a job that involves lifting, all this talk about safe lifting in industry makes me wonder how accurate those limits are for an FRC timeframe. Robots are definitely heavy, and many teams don’t design in features to make lifting easier or discuss safe lifting and moving processes.
For example, getting onto the inspection scale is typically terrible for teams - instead of moving the cart so the robot is lined up for easy transfer to the scale, they’ll pick it up, awkwardly turn around their cart to get to the scale, and then awkwardly crab walk/trip around the scale. Even when we mark out on the floor and set up cones to help indicate where to go to make things easy, teams will still insist on squatting down over a cone to put the robot down instead of taking it the easy way. So much of it is about pausing, thinking, and planning before lifting, and so many teams don’t do that.
When it comes to lifting itself, for one of our regionals, we might lift the robot twice every half hour. I was looking at the NIOSH manual on lifting, and it looks at the number and types of lifting in 15 minute segments to determine the safe limit. With our lifts being much less frequent than industry jobs, both in terms of during the event and when considered from a daily basis, I really wonder how applicable the limit is - I just don’t know enough.
Put yourself in the mind of a high school student in an environment filled with loud music, distractions, and adults who are consistently telling you where to go and what to do in a hurried voice.
Thinking things through takes time and experience.
Literally go back up a few posts to the response to what I posted as a reasonable suggestion and see that it was to point out that we can’t give teams time.
I fully understand that the show must go on but so much of the volunteer culture in FRC seems to miss that teams are comprised of inexperienced teenagers.
I really don’t know if this is relevant, but going waaay back, I remember that when we used Jaguar motor controllers we learned that pushing robots along the ground unpowered could damage the controllers, and so we had to move robots by lifting and carrying them. Since modern controllers such as Talons and Spark Maxes have become the overwhelming norm, and since they don’t carry the risk of failure from being pushed along, what exactly is the problem with moving robots onto the field by pushing them rather than carrying them?
I’d imagine the problem is that Swerve drives are really hard to turn manually. Tank drives with omni wheels for easier turning can most certainly be pushed, however.
I see how pushing a swerve is problematic. I just wonder how much of the way we handle moving robots on and off the field is a cultural figment of a past Era, where we had to keep the wheels off the ground.
Most of the issues I’ve seen surround the way people bring carts up along the field perimeter. If there was room to bring the carts up to the field straight on, and the gates were wide enough to walk through side by side with the robot, some of the difficulty could be removed.
