Weve read this with great interest and its causing a fair old bit of debate again amongst the committee.

Please bare with me, Im not a politician so find this stuff quite hard work, but Id like to clarify a couple of things if I can:

We understand Rogers and others point of view, as with every EO the final decision on safety practices is down to him, as its his neck (metaphorically speaking) thats on the line should there be an accident.
Its unfortunate that Roger was not a member of the FRA at the time this rule was introduced, as his view would have undoubtedly then have been taken into account along with all the other EOs.
We hope Roger will join the FRA over time and become a contributor, as has been said above.. theres no question as to his own technical knowledge and he has a perfect right to reject the FRA rules if he wishes.

Saying that.

This wasnt a rule that was introduced for the fun of it, there was and is great concern that at the most dangerous time of roboteering i.e the load and unload of robots, EOs, roboteers and arena staff had absolutely no external way of telling what state a robot was in.

In the instance of the afore mentioned accident last year, a roboteer returned to the robot after placing it into the arena because it appeared to not be working, he then proceeded to fiddle with the internals of the robot without removing the link, something which is very easy to forget to do in the heat of the moment. Due to the lack of exterior indication of power on board, the arena staff were not aware of this and had no means of being aware of this, they just had to trust that the roboteer was looking after himself properly. As it turns out, the link was in and the robots weapon was live.. the flipper fired while the roboteer was leaning over the robot and he was struck fairly soundly in the forehead region and thrown backwards a good 3 foot.
Luckily for all involved the arena door absorbed some of the force of the strike before it got to the roboteer... so the accident was not as serious as it could have been despite giving everyone present a damn good scare, and the roboteer in question a very nice bruise!

Returning to robots after activation is something that as EOs weve all seen on more occasions than we care to mention, and fiddling with robots while the link is still in is equally as common.

We would be extremely silly as live event organisers not to recognise this and try and provide a relatively easy to install and effective solution to the problem, remember that not only could an accident of this type be nasty for the roboteer involved, it could have far reaching ramifications for the event organiser and the growing live sport in general.
There is also the problem that should an accident of this type happen again after we as an organisation became aware of the issue, we could in theory with no solution in place actually be accused of being lax in setting down our best practice procedures.. this would not be a good thing for anyone, especially considering the great progress we have made over the past year or so with live event safety standards.

In closing:

The light has clear plusses for all the event organisers involved in the FRA, they between them run the large majority of the live events in this country and the technical team and roboteers that advised on this solution have all agreed it was the best way to deal with the problem without causing undue technical issues for the roboteers.
If it turns out over time it doesn€™t work, we€™ll undoubtedly re-evaluate but for the foreseeable future the power light is required for all FRA events in order for a robot to be run.

It€™s been suggested that we provide a guideline and suggest acceptable parts for roboteers so as to take some of the confusion out of the issue, I€™ll make sure it€™s discussed at the next committee meeting and that progress is made on this as soon as is possible.

Thanks once again for the feedback, this is after all part of what the FRA was about right from the start, we€™re not here to dictate but to garner opinion and try and take informed decisions on what is best for the sport.. I hope to see this long continue

Regards
Samuel Jones
FRA safety executive