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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
by LordSnooty October 30, 2009 11:01 AM PDT Back in the day I was writing robot motion control code in Germany. These were muscular 4 metre tall industrial robots which could zip around at several metres/second. Our "star" assembler programmer came into the lab with a brand new 5 1/4" floppy and told me he had "solved the fork/join problem" and would I mind trying it out. I loaded it up and hit the Big Red Button.
Well, it forked all right. It forked all over high memory and then started writing from address zero, which was where all the motor control registers were located, with the result that the robot immediately started swinging its arm at full speed towards me. I had to dive off the platform at full stretch horizontally - just like in the movies - to avoid having my face smashed.
Registered Member #1497
Joined: Thu May 22 2008, 05:24AM
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 801
While not nearly a horror story, working on an autonomous robotic boat in a swimming pool has its own risks, because.. well... its autonomous. Besides the obvious possibility for hardware failure, software glitches sometimes determine my quite non-neon orange body as the target buoy and begin a chase worthy of yakety sax.
Despite the slow speed of the boat, the team was more interested in seeing how well the boat could track me since it decided to lock on, instead of hitting the remote emergency stop...
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
i did hear somewhere that a poor worker was killed by an industrial car manufacturing robot in Japan. Similar incident, he was testing software and the robot "took off" and mangled him before he could react.
Registered Member #1262
Joined: Fri Jan 25 2008, 05:22AM
Location: Maryland, USA
Posts: 451
I've never had a personal robotics horror story, but I have been in a class with people learning to program microcontrollers in basic. Of course someone started the robot too soon, while it was still on the table. It of course drove right off, and sustained some minor damage.
Registered Member #2028
Joined: Mon Mar 16 2009, 08:13PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 319
I have heard of a similar near-miss accident, but i dont know any details like when and where it happened. It was a manufacturing business that had just installed a new cnc lasercutter, and were doing some early testing on the device. Somehow they had installed the cutterhead wrong so that when they fired it up the beam went horisontally, through the wall and through three cars in the parkinglot before ending in a hole in the pavement.
I have no idea wether this is true or just another urban myth, but it shure qualifies as a robotics horror story.
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<OT> Robotics horror stories...
