well of course working on heavy machinery can be dangerous… but has anybody on your team been hurt durring the years of working on the robot?
on our team 322, one serious, and one seriously funny injury occured this past year… the first was when our driver was opperating on a surface grinder to grind a washer down to fit in our transmission. well he finished grinding, but forgot to turn the machine off when dusting the table off. his middle finger went through the surface grinder and as a result, his nail was ripped off the finger, and he was rushed to the hospital. later that same day he returned to finish working on the transmission. his finger nail is now almost completely grown back.
our second (funny) injury occured when we were trying to glue a tread to one of our wheels. we used epoxy, and to make sure it was on tight, we used a rubber surgical tube to hold it down. after wrapping the tube around the wheel about 20 times, we were trying to tie a knot in it, when it slipped and began spinning off the wheel. all we heard was slap slap slap, and our engineer was rolling over on the ground. it turns out that as it was spinning off the wheel, the tube hit him in the nuts. imagine getting hit in the nuts like 20 times in one second
somehow… our programming was screwed up and “joy_1_trigger” would run autonomous mode. (we had a special button elsewhere to run auto code for testing purposes).
Well, we are sitting at glr, getting code set, testing wings… people are walking by… we drop one wing… then attempt to do the other one… well the downed wing snaps up, and the robot takes off. I was holding onto it to rest my hand … then I was holding on for dear life. I was holding back our quite powerful bot (we shoved 25 around like nobody’s business at nationals [practice rounds]). someone else, I think one of the engineers, jumps up to help out. While all this was going on, someone was walking by and nearly got sandwhiched between the bot and the cement wall. Whoever was helping me, reached in and hit the breaker button (turn off bot). After we realised what just happened, [auto code ran], we realised how lucky we were. The next part of the code was to back up. Which would have done very serious damage to me, my helper, the computer, table… and a few other things/people.
Later on, a similar problem occured but the tether cable popped out. The bot was about 4" from a person when she stopped.
Last year, with 247, we had the robot doing a “safety glasses check” on one of the engineers. Could have stabbed out his eye.
Just about every day I worked on the bot I got some kind of cut.
Nearly had my throught cut (I did, but not too deep). Picture: here. Was worse than it seems. That’s after i cleaned up the blood.
Last year we were fixing up our robot from the last season. We had two claws (one one each side of the robot) that were just resting on each other up right. we were all standing around the robot. One team member decided to lift one side of the robot and the claws fell and hit one of our freshman full force in the head. We thought he was going to black out because it hit him so hard.
Another time i was drilling a small piece of metal, the drill slippe, and i ended up drilling my finger nail. It was cracked, and turned black and blue.
My friend frank was helping me put rivets on the chain because they broke off. He sat one of them in the hole and the chain slid off the table. He went for it and that rivet went into his skin. It looked like it went in deep when he was pulling it out.
.:ahh: :yikes:
St Louis Regional
They were testing our wings, and whoever was operating lowered the wrong wing and clunked me on the head when I was talking to a judge.
Pittsburgh Regional
Our head teacher, Mr Railey was drilling a hole for a new lexan plate for our drive victors to be mounted on and he slipped and drilled right into his thumb. Blood shot all over the place, even on another engineers face
Midwest Regional
I was drilling a hole and I slipped and drilled into my thumb on Friday morning too. Kinda hurt, but it wasn’t as bad as Mr Railey’s thumb hole. Hey you can still see the outline of the scar too…its pretty cool
A person who was supposed to be holding one of our robot’s shuttles/arms did not hold it long and it fell upon my head when I was attaching a gripper/orienter device that I had just finished to the robot… hit me square on the forehead, I feel down, and it started bleeding a little. Kinda hurt a lot…
NO SERIOUS INJURIES FOR 108. A FUNNY ONE WAS WHEN ONE OF MECH ENGINEERS CUT CUT HIMSELF AND WIPED IT OFF ON A RAG THAT WAS DRIPPING WITH OIL (I DONT THINK HE REALIZED.)
AT UCF WE WERE TESTING OUR WINGS AND ONE KID GOT KNOCKED RIGHT IN THE HEAD. ALSO AT UCF I ALMOST REAPEADTLY GOT KNOCKED AROUND BY TEAM 147’s FLY-UP WINGS (SIMILAR DESIGN TO TEAM 71 BUT WIDER). THAT ABOUT IT.
P.S. DID ANYONE GET LOCKED INTO THEIR TEAM’S CRATE CAUSE I DID.
You know, a week back, I had a virus that disabled my ability to type and that sucked… took a while to fix. Be glad you have the ability to be “outspoken” with a caps lock key.
1996, Hexagon Havoc, between rounds I was fixing a plastic chain on our robot and put a screwdriver across my finger, resulting in mass bleeding. Missed our next round. People will tell you that could only happen to me!
this wasnt really during the season, so i dont know if it counts, but we had the robot at my sisters grad party, and i had never driven it before. one of the guys who basically was one of our main builders was setting it up for me to drive, and when he plugged it in i accidently knocked him over w/ it!! hm hm hm…
We had a running list on the blackboard…it became kind of a running joke. There is a whole section on it in our team video this year. Including a very funny part with the robot whacking Mr. Noble and Jim, our mechanic. Repeatedly.
When I was programming the auto, I was doing dead reckoning in bits and pieces, and when it finally worked to the end, i set it to do the full course, forgetting, of course, this meant continuing up the ramp forever. So after starting it, I went over there expecting it to stop, but it didn’t, and ran me over, leaving a large gash on my forehead. The good news is, I stopped the robot.
One of our students was using a table saw to cut off a strip of UHMW (Ultra High Molecular Weight) plastic that we use as a bearing for our arm. (The arm rotates in a hole in the plastic which is very slippery stuff.) Apparently the plastic got hot and stuck to the blade, and somehow it pulled his finger over to the blade. He had a lot of stitches in that finger. The plastic is great stuff, but be careful if you are ever cutting it. A stick with a notch to hold down and push the plastic (push stick) would have prevented the accident.
Our telescoping arm this year has two motors. One raises the arm and the other rotates it.
One day during testing, the arm came up but didn’t rotate. The engineer who designed the arm, came forward to see what the problem was. At that point, the arm suddenly swung and hit him right between the eyes on the bridge of his nose. He was hurting for several days. Apparently there was a loose wire which became “un-loose”. (After this event, there were some ideas of changing the robot’s name from “Yoda” to something like “Franky”, short for “Frankenstein II”.)
at the philly regional, our driver was working on something on the robot, i dont know what exactly, and her hand was under the robot. well, another girl pushed the button for the suction cups to go down and they came down on our drivers finger and smashed it. it was pretty bad. it swelled up, it was terrible and all this before the elimination rounds. but she still got through it, she’s a trooper!! after that, it got infected and she had to go on medication for it, but it cleared up for nationals, so we were happy.
it may not be an injury, and it may not be robot related, but it is related to FIRST… but i feel that Pres. Bush falling off the segway is the FUNNIEST “injury” to date.
*Originally posted by Will Hanashiro *
**it may not be an injury, and it may not be robot related, but it is related to FIRST… but i feel that Pres. Bush falling off the segway is the FUNNIEST “injury” to date. **
that was hilarous. i belive it was tues night on the late show they had the top ten things going through bush’s mind as he fell off the segway.
