Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him — Malfunctioning sensor system blamed for technician’s death at Korean food plant::Malfunctioning sensor system blamed for technician’s death at Korean food plant
Sounds like plant management needs to enforce lock-out tag-out procedure. That’s rule 1 of working on heavy machinery, no matter how safe you think it is.
The tech probably had work requirements that made it impossible to actually have time to do safety procedures. Management is always a part of the problem in these situations.
I haven’t been in a plant where management tells everyone to go crazy and ignore safety because 1. they aren’t monsters and 2. lawsuits. They’re financially motivated to do the right thing. When I saw the article, my first thought was this person disabled mandatory lockouts because it’s convenient.
Have you been in a South Korean plant? They famously have terrible working conditions, though they’re starting to fight back against that.
He was a technician from the robot manufacturer, so it’s on them for not having a proper procedure for maintaining sensors while the motors are disabled. I can’t imagine working on an industrial robot while the motors are powered… That’s completely reckless.
Did you read the article? The guy was diagnosing a sensor issue, can’t LOTO, you would have no power to diagnose the issue with.
You could disable the motors. You can read out sensors without the arm moving. And if the arm needs to move, do it from a distance (cable connected or wireless).
A human shouldn’t be anywhere near moving robotic arms, ever.
The guy worked for the robot manufacturer, according to the article! You’d think would have been much more aware of the robot’s reach, and the safety procedures. Plus, I’m pretty sure you can step through the robot programming slowly. I’ve seen our programmers do it. Please don’t tell me he was in the cell standing next to the crate or whatever, with that thing running full production speed.
You’re not wrong, but there is also a reason for each of those things to not be possible in lots of scenarios. The article made it sound like it was commissioning test, you have to do functional tests on the entire system, not individual parts at that point.
The machine may not have been able to be cable connected or wireless or maybe the employee cut corners too, people seem to forget this part too.
You shouldn’t, but there is plenty of usecases where someone needs to unfortunately, that’s just the reality of the world.
A sensor issue on any machine, intelligent it not, is not justification to forgo a lock out, tag out of that machine.
It is like a shredder that only activates if something is in the hopper. If the sensor can only be accessed in the hopper, the shredder should not be operational when fixing the sensor.
There are many ways to do this safely. All robotic arms come with a disable key that powers off the axis motors, latches all the brakes, but leaves the sensors and end of arm tooling powered up to troubleshoot. Troubleshooting can also be done via PC and watching inputs/ outputs on the program.
That’s just not true, more modern machines may have those safety features, but they aren’t on every thing.
Why is it programmed to kill boxes of peppers
For the same reason that someone decided that it would be a good idea to have machines be able to generate energy from organic material….
Yeah, let’s build robots that can feed on humans to recharge their batteries, no way that’d be a problem.
Wtf is this fear mongering? I’m totally for luddism but this is something else. Not the first time a machine kills a person, and will not be the last. Put panic stop buttons on any machine that can potentially harm a human, and nowadays you can add a range of sensors that can help identify a living thing from a box of vegetables. This is entirely the fault of designers.
Btw i refuse to read the article if the post keeps this title and picture.
it had a sensor for it, it malfunctioned, now why it wasn’t turned off while the tech was in there is another story. If they were testing it, they should have been a safe distance away or had it mostly powered off. This is just unsafe work environment.
A thread on a different article about the same thing had someone demanding a change in law to make robots safer and stop this happening again because 48 people were killed by robots in the USA…since 1992.
Yes, there’s a lot to take in with that. Yes, some people are idiots.
Wait until you hear how crazy dangerous this thing called the cotton gin is.
So I never understood the importance of the cotton gin until I grew some cotton for giggles.
Y’all ever tried to get those seeds out?! There’s 4-8 per boll and they are enmeshed. Just cleaning a couple of puffs is a tough chore. And waste as little as possible. Now do 40 acres. The bales around here are about the size of a short tractor trailer box.
Also, try picking cotton some time. Puts a whole new spin on slavery. By harvest time those leaves turn into pointy, hardened razor blades. I barely reached in and one slide up the side of my finger about 1/2". Took 2-weeks to heal since I apparently got a fat inoculation of bacteria.
Now do it fast, bent over, from pre-dawn to just past dusk. And get whipped if you don’t hustle. Slave’s hands had to be lumps of unfeeling callous.
Oh, and the part school didn’t teach about the cotton gin; It made cotton vastly more profitable. Guess where I’m going with this.
And to lighten the mood, have some racist ass field trip.
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