[Noisebridge-discuss] About the missing robotic arm on wheel chair robot

[Gopiballava Flaherty]

Another thing to consider, depending on the weight of what you're planning to manipulate, is to attach the arm with breakable bolts or similar. So that ramming it into somebody will detach it. 

I couldn't find any moderately priced estop switches last I looked. Also, the batteries are quite high current. 

I was thinking that a low extraction force connector wired in line with the motor controller could make a good hack emergency stop mechanism. Have a bright red tag on it, with one connector rigidly mounted to the robot and the other on a cable that can be grabbed. 

That wouldn't fix the problem of stupid people sneaking up behind you with the robot, but it would at least sort out the problem I had with it slowly trying to crush bicycles. We literally wrestled the robot away. 

Thanks,

gopi at iPhone


On Jun 11, 2012, at 17:24, Martin Bogomolni <martinbogo at gmail.com> wrote:

> As a safety-third advocate, I still concur that a nice large e-stop
> button would be a very, very, very good idea on the wheelchair bot.
> 
> ( ... and I'm someone that likes to build machines that throw 2x4's
> into things )
> 
> -M
> 
> On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 4:16 PM, Gopiballava Flaherty
> <gopiballava at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Jun 11, 2012, at 17:07, Jake <jake at spaz.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> Some people thought it was too unweildy
>> 
>> Unwieldy would be one way to describe it. Dangerous would be a more accurate way.
>> 
>> The last time I saw the robot in use, it was randomly crashing in to bikes and had no functional emergency stop mechanism. It was quite challenging to stop it.
>> 
>> The motors are high torque and fast. Without the arm, the robot is pretty dangerous. With it, it is potentially lethal.
>> 
>> I would encourage you to consider safety first and figure out how to properly control and stop the robot before you make it even more dangerous.
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