[TaylorAlexander]

Wow that is a good reminder to secure my robots when driving... a deer jumped out in front of me recently and I had to hit the brakes hard. Luckily didn’t have my robot in the car. As a fellow Robogames competitor I’m glad you made it out of that crash!

[kungtotte]

You should secure everything in your car.

If you crash into something going only 50 kilometres per hour, things that are the same weight as your average smartphone will have enough force on impact to kill you.

[barrkel]

In a dead stop, maybe, but a car isn't likely to be stopped dead.

I've been told on motorcycle hazard awareness courses that if your body hits a solid object at 50 kph, it's 50% mortality risk - it's enough deceleration force to rupture your aorta. Take something like a sign post to the chest and you'll be lucky to survive.

[nordsieck]

> In a dead stop, maybe, but a car isn't likely to be stopped dead.

I guess it depends on the kind of accident.

In a head-on collision or if you run into a tree/concrete wall, that's pretty close to being stopped dead.

In the more common rear end or "T" collisions, probably not.

[tsomctl]

If you hit a tree or concrete wall, you still have crumple zones that slow you down over a short period of time.

[KMag]

But the crumple zones don't help the objects (now projectiles) flying about your car. The crumple zones will finishing crumpling around the same time that something sitting on the rear deck of your car will hit you in the back of the head at 50 kph.

The original point was about unsecured objects in the car becoming deadly.

[barrkel]

Of course they do. They decrease the rate of deceleration.

Whether it's enough to make a difference, we should make calculations. I'd expect 50kph is where marginal increases in mortality start to become larger, so it wouldn't take much to reduce harm, I believe.

[jacquesm]

Not a week ago on a road somewhere in the eastern part of Europe: A dumptruck with in its bin a 100KW genset, secured with a little piece of rope. Needless to say I gave it a very wide berth and hung well behind. An accident with that rig would have serious consequences even with the load secured, without that it is too dangerous to be in traffic, let alone on a two lane highway.

[ant6n]

Huh. Fighting robots in car trunks seem to be more common than I realized.

[TaylorAlexander]

Well my robot is an explorer:

https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/

[jacquesm]

That's a beast. Nice work!

[TaylorAlexander]

Thank you!

[Teknoman117]

Lots of good memories from Robogames. I had first read about it in Servo magazine when I lived on the east coast as a kid. My family ended up moving to California when I was in high school and I was a regular attendee from that point on. I entered robomagellan regularly during college (except the one year the university's club entered the heavyweight combat robot competition). After college I ended up moving to Orange County and didn't attend much.

Sad to see that it ended.

[TaylorAlexander]

Well for some throwback memories I have some old TechTV coverage of Robogames 2005 of my YouTube channel. I’m the kid with bleached blonde hair in the video.

https://youtu.be/J2R-TlBomnQ

[godzillabrennus]

TechTV was amazing.