6 ms·

That's a good story. Yeah I feel like there must be soo many more opportunities to physically damage/harm something from robotics than software alone.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago
Anything with an actuator, really. I'm a controls engineer, we work with all kinds of hazards and it's my responsibility to run the risk assessment that makes sure no minimum-wage operator gets harmed because of our machine. People are the squishiest, weakest, most sensitive part of just about any shop, so there's a lot of risks to assess! One key observation, though, when working with code is that the machine becomes so close to predictable that it's more dangerous than if it were unpredictable. A cordless handheld drill is hardly a tool that most people would call 'hazardous'. You turn the trigger, the thing rotates, grab the chuck and you can likely stall it. But that much energy in something driven by code is extremely dangerous, it's waiting for any of who knows how many conditions to take off, a common one is that putting your hands in/on something that seems to be not moving can 'make' a sensor and the machine will take off. There are definitely two kinds of safety domains, one applies to manually operated tools where the operator of, say, a knife is responsible for their own safety - if they cut themselves, they're at fault, not the knifemaker. There's another kind of safety engineering where if the machine takes off 'by itself' while an operator is in the way it's the machine designer's fault for not stopping that from happening, the operator can't be expected to know what's going on. The latter should become more common as computers continue to permeate everything we use - that cordless drill is no longer controlled by the operator with a trigger switch that connects power to a DC motor, it's a brushless motor driver with an analog input sensing the position of the trigger and the EMF of the motor, and the charge state of the batteries, and who knows what else. Bump a sensor and it might take off, you don't know why it does what it does. I'll continue to make my automated cells as safe as I can, but don't trust code that's not so simple you can be confident of how it works.
- dharmab 5y ago
  > A cordless handheld drill is hardly a tool that most people would call 'hazardous'. You turn the trigger, the thing rotates, grab the chuck and you can likely stall it. But that much energy in something driven by code is extremely dangerous, it's waiting for any of who knows how many conditions to take off, a common one is that putting your hands in/on something that seems to be not moving can 'make' a sensor and the machine will take off. A friend needed a valve cover gasket changed on his Honda, and his wife needed to use the car for her Uber runs that night. He came over and instead of our usual hand tools I put a socket adapter on my 20V drill to speed up disassembly. I handed the drill to him and told him "start on the lowest torque setting, and move up in small steps." I turned around to grab more tools from the toolbox. A minute later, I heard a loud noise. I turned to see the car's windshield cracked and a shocked look on my friend's face. My friend was used to his renter's power drill. He hadn't anticipated how much torque a modern contractor's drill outputs and set the torque to the maximum setting. On the third valve cover bolt, the drill had caught on the bolt head and spun my friend around, smashing the battery into the windshield. There's a piece of paper taped to me toolbox called "List of things <friend's name> may not attempt unsupervised." It gained a couple of entries that day...
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Why would a drill be engineered to put out more torque than a human holding the handle could be expected to counterbalance?
    - dharmab 5y ago
      For drilling holes in soft materials like drywall and wood, or even softer metals like aluminum. I recently used that drill to drill into a motorcycle engine to remove a stuck rotor cover. Relevant old article: http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      Powerful electric drills will often come with an extra handle on the side (or a mounting point for one) so that you can brace them with both hands. It's up to the user to set an appropriate torque limit if they're only using one hand.
- prox 5y ago
  One of the reasons I love to dable in the game Space Engineers is that you get to experiment with simulated physical equipment. Things often go wrong and boom (or Klang in SE parlance) and you often die or hurt yourself. You seen learn to program in steps for safety.
rohansingh 5y ago
Heh, you don't even need proper robotics. Back in 2002, I was getting a package with a brand new Pocket PC (smartphone without the phone, running Windows). And I really wanted to know when it was delivered, but the UPS guy would regularly leave packages on the porch without ringing the bell or anything. This was before you could get delivery alerts or anything like that. But I had a spare laptop with an integrated webcam (wow!), and I'd figured out how to make it run actions on motion detection. My plan was to point the laptop at the door, and eject the CD drive when it detected motion. The tray of the drive would push a water bottle off the table. That would land on a seesaw, which would launch a deck of cards in a hard plastic case at the door and make a very loud noise. It's unclear why I couldn't just play a really sound on the speakers instead. Anyway, I tested the program by standing in front of the laptop and waving my hand. It worked perfectly! The CD tray ejected, and I watched as the water bottle slowly rolled off the table. It dropped onto the seesaw...... and instantly launched a hard plastic deck at my face and got me right between the eyes. Never again have I been in so much pain and also so excited about my code working perfectly at the exact same time.
- faceplanted 5y ago
  This made me actually laugh out loud, it feels like some of the things I came up with as a teenager wanting to do robotics and automation but having no money or way to purchase things online, water bottles were actually a good way of powering things like opening curtains by dropping them on a string. Also I like that even after you came up with "knock something off the table" you felt you needed a seesaw catapult thing and didn't just knock something off that could make the actual sound like a cake tin or bell or something.
  - rohansingh 5y ago
    > Also I like that even after you came up with "knock something off the table" you felt you needed a seesaw catapult thing and didn't just knock something off that could make the actual sound like a cake tin or bell or something. It totally doesn't make any sense! I think I might have been fascinated with the idea of Rube Goldberg machines or something at the time. Or maybe I thought I could build a "security system" with it? Also it was summer and I was a bored teenager.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

Anything with an actuator, really. I'm a controls engineer, we work with all kinds of hazards and it's my responsibility to run the risk assessment that makes sure no minimum-wage operator gets harmed because of our machine. People are the squishiest, weakest, most sensitive part of just about any shop, so there's a lot of risks to assess! One key observation, though, when working with code is that the machine becomes so close to predictable that it's more dangerous than if it were unpredictable. A cordless handheld drill is hardly a tool that most people would call 'hazardous'. You turn the trigger, the thing rotates, grab the chuck and you can likely stall it. But that much energy in something driven by code is extremely dangerous, it's waiting for any of who knows how many conditions to take off, a common one is that putting your hands in/on something that seems to be not moving can 'make' a sensor and the machine will take off. There are definitely two kinds of safety domains, one applies to manually operated tools where the operator of, say, a knife is responsible for their own safety - if they cut themselves, they're at fault, not the knifemaker. There's another kind of safety engineering where if the machine takes off 'by itself' while an operator is in the way it's the machine designer's fault for not stopping that from happening, the operator can't be expected to know what's going on. The latter should become more common as computers continue to permeate everything we use - that cordless drill is no longer controlled by the operator with a trigger switch that connects power to a DC motor, it's a brushless motor driver with an analog input sensing the position of the trigger and the EMF of the motor, and the charge state of the batteries, and who knows what else. Bump a sensor and it might take off, you don't know why it does what it does. I'll continue to make my automated cells as safe as I can, but don't trust code that's not so simple you can be confident of how it works.

dharmab 5y ago
> A cordless handheld drill is hardly a tool that most people would call 'hazardous'. You turn the trigger, the thing rotates, grab the chuck and you can likely stall it. But that much energy in something driven by code is extremely dangerous, it's waiting for any of who knows how many conditions to take off, a common one is that putting your hands in/on something that seems to be not moving can 'make' a sensor and the machine will take off. A friend needed a valve cover gasket changed on his Honda, and his wife needed to use the car for her Uber runs that night. He came over and instead of our usual hand tools I put a socket adapter on my 20V drill to speed up disassembly. I handed the drill to him and told him "start on the lowest torque setting, and move up in small steps." I turned around to grab more tools from the toolbox. A minute later, I heard a loud noise. I turned to see the car's windshield cracked and a shocked look on my friend's face. My friend was used to his renter's power drill. He hadn't anticipated how much torque a modern contractor's drill outputs and set the torque to the maximum setting. On the third valve cover bolt, the drill had caught on the bolt head and spun my friend around, smashing the battery into the windshield. There's a piece of paper taped to me toolbox called "List of things <friend's name> may not attempt unsupervised." It gained a couple of entries that day...
- whatshisface 5y ago
  Why would a drill be engineered to put out more torque than a human holding the handle could be expected to counterbalance?
  - dharmab 5y ago
    For drilling holes in soft materials like drywall and wood, or even softer metals like aluminum. I recently used that drill to drill into a motorcycle engine to remove a stuck rotor cover. Relevant old article: http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Powerful electric drills will often come with an extra handle on the side (or a mounting point for one) so that you can brace them with both hands. It's up to the user to set an appropriate torque limit if they're only using one hand.
prox 5y ago
One of the reasons I love to dable in the game Space Engineers is that you get to experiment with simulated physical equipment. Things often go wrong and boom (or Klang in SE parlance) and you often die or hurt yourself. You seen learn to program in steps for safety.

rohansingh 5y ago

Heh, you don't even need proper robotics. Back in 2002, I was getting a package with a brand new Pocket PC (smartphone without the phone, running Windows). And I really wanted to know when it was delivered, but the UPS guy would regularly leave packages on the porch without ringing the bell or anything. This was before you could get delivery alerts or anything like that. But I had a spare laptop with an integrated webcam (wow!), and I'd figured out how to make it run actions on motion detection. My plan was to point the laptop at the door, and eject the CD drive when it detected motion. The tray of the drive would push a water bottle off the table. That would land on a seesaw, which would launch a deck of cards in a hard plastic case at the door and make a very loud noise. It's unclear why I couldn't just play a really sound on the speakers instead. Anyway, I tested the program by standing in front of the laptop and waving my hand. It worked perfectly! The CD tray ejected, and I watched as the water bottle slowly rolled off the table. It dropped onto the seesaw...... and instantly launched a hard plastic deck at my face and got me right between the eyes. Never again have I been in so much pain and also so excited about my code working perfectly at the exact same time.

faceplanted 5y ago
This made me actually laugh out loud, it feels like some of the things I came up with as a teenager wanting to do robotics and automation but having no money or way to purchase things online, water bottles were actually a good way of powering things like opening curtains by dropping them on a string. Also I like that even after you came up with "knock something off the table" you felt you needed a seesaw catapult thing and didn't just knock something off that could make the actual sound like a cake tin or bell or something.
- rohansingh 5y ago
  > Also I like that even after you came up with "knock something off the table" you felt you needed a seesaw catapult thing and didn't just knock something off that could make the actual sound like a cake tin or bell or something. It totally doesn't make any sense! I think I might have been fascinated with the idea of Rube Goldberg machines or something at the time. Or maybe I thought I could build a "security system" with it? Also it was summer and I was a bored teenager.