the type of robot, the operating
environment, and the purpose of the
robot. What constitutes safe operation
of a BattleBot engaged in a fight to the
death in a BattleBot arena doesn’t necessarily apply to a robot designed to
explore robot-robot communications. A
few globally applicable safe operation
heuristics are:
RESOURCES
All Electronics Corp.
www.allelectronics.com
BattleBot Rules & Guidelines
www.battlebots.com
Crydom, Inc.
www.crydom.com
Parallax
www.parallax.com
Surge Protection Device Handbook.
Cooper Bussman, Inc., 2002.
www.bussman.com/apen/pubs/
spd/ index.asp
• Charge batteries in a well ventilated
area and use a charger that guards
against overheating and overcharging.
• Affix robot arms and other stationary
robots securely on a stable platform
prior to power-up.
• Establish a safety zone around a
robot within which no one may enter
during operation.
From Here
The above safety measures apply
in varying degrees to experimental
robots and those designed for exploration and assorted tasks. Robots
intended for competition — such as
BattleBot-style competitions — must
abide by specific safety guidelines.
Even if you are not intending to enter
your robot in a competition, it’s a
good idea to review safety guidelines
associated with events for ideas on
how you can improve the safety of
your robot.
A common question regarding
robot safety is how much safety
overhead is enough. In general, the
greater the safety risk, the more
safety should be emphasized in robot
design. A kill switch and comprehensive energy management circuitry
generally don’t make sense for a slow
moving, 12 ounce carpet rover.
However, a highly mobile, 20 pound
robot equipped with an expensive
sensor array, significant on-board
processing hardware, and a high-current drive system may dictate a full
suite of safety technologies.
The obvious tradeoffs are safety
for increased complexity, weight, cost,
and development time. Increased
complexity usually translates to a
greater likelihood of failure because of
an increased number of failure points.
For example, a dead battery in a
remote enable/kill switch can disable
an otherwise operational robot.
However, replacing a battery is a trivial
matter compared with replacing an
expensive video camera because you
couldn’t stop your robot from
slamming into a table leg. SV
56 SERVO 01.2007
