6 years at Calspan/Veridian Engineering/Cornell Labs running HYGE sled accelerator test. Full scale vehicle crash testing untilizing fully instrumented dummies. 
Ill try to find some pics but picture a 12 inch diameter stainless steel tube that is 2 inches thick and about 15 feet long. That has a piston inside of it attached to a ram. That piston is locked into position and the cylinder is filled with 4000psi of nitrogen. There is a disk within that is ruptured via solenoid air valve. The ram the fires and the carriage, which weighs at least a ton, and any payload is accelerated from 0 to over 50mph in LESS then a second.
This will kill you. A guy, literally got cut in half by one of these in Detroit. 4000psi of pressure will peel ALL the flesh off you, right down to the bone, instantly
http://www.calspan.com/hyge.htm
I codesigned the PLC driven Control Console and electromechanicals.
I installed the new controls which were replacing a system built in 1960 WHILE the facility was fully operational and at volume. I did data acquisition and analysis and set up the tests which included some really interesting pyrotechnics with airbags. i was their lead airbag guy.
After Calspan I became the Manager and operator on a prototype, fully automated, material storage, retreival, sorting, depalletizing and palletizing system worth about 10million dollars… building/ect excluded…25mil for the whole thing. This system Utilized two 10 story robots that ran on a track the length of a building and stored and retreived pallet loads within racks. Each pallet weighed up to 2 tons. These were large pallets of beer. For reference there were 150 cases of Coors 18pk cans on a pallet.
Orders are called in from the stores and fed into the system. Robots retreive the necessary pallets and another 3 large vacuum based robots strip the pallets layer by layer. Each product is conveyed and diverted into buffer lanes. Depending on what a certain delivery calls for the cases are ejected form the buffer lanes in a specific order. They are then conveyed to a sorter which diverts the cases accoring to order to 7 Fanuc palletizing robots. We ran 410ib’s.
http://www.fanucrobotics.com/index.asp?item=1296&name=Videos&site=1
I dont know if you realize the scale of these things but each one is quite a bit larger then a man. We ran 7. These thing will pick up a 50lb case and swing it around with such acceleration and precision its amazing to watch. I almost got my head, literally, sliced in half because I bypassed the safety interlocks to do some work on the fly. These are the robots that Build and weld cars.
The system processes the case sizes present in the order and plans case placement and pallet build in order to generate a uniform pallet. This is the first system of its kind in the United States. I ran the building, all aspects of control, programming, maintenance, ect. It wasnt just running the thing… it was working out bugs and creating new procedures to overcome problems and get the job accomplished… all this was dont while in full tilt production. 12+ hour days were not uncommon. I ran the building, all aspects of control, programming, maintenance, ect. I was lead on everything concernin this thing. I knew more about this thing then the guys that built it… which was Siemens Diematic btw. I was responsible for getting 30 trucks out every morning. That or wilson farms and tops and you local bar doesnt have any beer.
Any other questions?
