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Man crushed to death by robot that mistook him for a box of vegetables
- textadventure 3y agoThis is how the machine uprising starts. "Mistook", sure.
- BirAdam 3y agoThis would be an absolutely horrifying way to go. I hope that whatever his beliefs he finds peace, of if he were an atheist, I hope that memories of him live on in those who knew him.
- ge96 3y agoI have vivid images from accident videos, people getting wrapped around spinning lathes and their entrails hitting the roof of a building oh man.
- harryquach 3y agoI've seen those as well and get nauseous when thinking about them. Those accidents happen so quick, I can only hope there was no suffering.
- ThrowAway1922A 3y agoWhy watch this kind of thing? I don't get it and frankly it disgusts me that people do.
- ge96 3y agoNot for fun. But does remind me I'm a fragile bag of meat.
- throwaway743 3y agoMore effective than your typical workplace safety videos and lectures.
- seabird 3y agoIt used to be something that you only really and truly understood when it happened to your buddy or somebody your buddy knew. Now we don't need somebody we know to get blown up in an arc flash incident or grabbed by a lathe to actually understand the forces at play. It's awful and you shouldn't subject yourself to very much of it, but if you're around these machines, it's critically important that you have visceral fear of what comes after a mistake.
- jacquesm 3y agoIndeed. If you're not scared of industrial machinery you're probably doing it wrong.
- knodi123 3y agoSurely not the first death by industrial robot... those things are notorious for being powerful and for being designed for a human-free work area.
- eichin 3y agoit's not even the first this year. But yeah, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67354709 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67354709 (non-paywalled coverage of the same story) it sounds very much like not doing lockout/tagout or at least hitting the e-Stop before inspecting something. Looks like South Korea has an osha-equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_Occupational_Safety_and_Health_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_Occupational_Safety_and_... but I have no idea if they have modern robot safety standards.
- jacquesm 3y ago> it sounds very much like not doing lockout/tagout or at least hitting the e-Stop before inspecting something That was exactly my thought when reading it. If the e-stop had been depressed this likely would have never happened. But with the system live all bets are off, especially if it is already malfunctioning. You're essentially one queued G-code away from getting mauled.
- mikequinlan 3y agoThis article says the first death occurred in 1979. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/robot-safety-standards-regulation-human-fatalities/675231/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/robot... >One day in 1979, a robot at a Ford Motor Company casting plant malfunctioned—human workers determined that it was not going fast enough. And so 25-year-old Robert Williams was asked to climb into a storage rack to help move things along. The one-ton robot continued to work silently, smashing into Williams’s head and instantly killing him. This was reportedly the first incident in which a robot killed a human; many more would follow.
- sandworm101 3y agoIt isnt just the industrial robots. Earlier this year, a man in london was crushed by a "telescoping urinal", a thing i did not know even existed. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64430454 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64430454
- gustavus 3y ago> The man, who was in his 40s, had been inspecting a problem with the robot’s sensor at a distribution centre for agricultural produce in South Gyeongsang province So not that it diminishes the tragedy but it sounds like this was a worker that was working on a malfunctioning piece of machinery and that's what caused the accident. Not a case of ML vision misclassified something, but rather an industrial piece of machinery malfunctioned.
- saulrh 3y agoSixty thousand ton stamping presses are technically robots :V
- bsder 3y agoAnd have been killing and maiming people for a long time: See: Tony Iommi
- jacquesm 3y agoA manufacturer of office gear in the Netherlands had one that would 'every now and then' come down randomly. It turned out to be a relay in an ancient AC unit that generated so much interference that it triggered the control of the press. Super dangerous, and very hard to trouble shoot what the cause was.
- nradov 3y agoArticle is missing some key details. Every industrial robot that I've seen has at least a line painted in the floor, or more often a physical barrier, and workers are required to stay behind it when the robot is powered on. Did this factory not have such basic precautions, or did the dead worker violate protocol, or did another worker turn on the robot at the wrong time?
- eichin 3y agoAll of those are possible, but food handling usually uses less powerful robots (simply because they're a lot cheaper) so there may have been some complacency about them not being that dangerous. (Physical barriers can be tricky to get right too, though - there have been incidents of "worker crushed between robot and inside of safety cage" though design standards have been updated in response to that.)
- jacquesm 3y agoThe one this article is about is an absolute brute.
- eichin 3y agoAny idea what model? The bbc picture looked like implausible artwork (way too much expensive hardware in-frame for a "replace cheap humans with cheaper robots" scenario) but I could see them picking a low-end industrial/automotive arm instead of a "collaborative" arm...
- jacquesm 3y agoThe BBC article picture is just filler (they should more clearly indicate it when their pictures have nothing to do with the article). Top picture: https://m.yna.co.kr/amp/view/AKR20231108062151052 https://m.yna.co.kr/amp/view/AKR20231108062151052 I've been trying to figure out the brand but enough of the text on the arm is obscured that I can't make it out beyond NZ...MI or something to that effect. I'd love it if someone could figure out what make and model it is. It's a palletizing robot, it looks superficially quite a bit like the Kawasaki models but the brand name fragment clearly doesn't match that (and that would be Japanese, not South Korean).
- qwery 3y agoBullshit. If somebody actually died here it's an atrocious way to report it. An unnamed man. An unnamed plant owner. Story apparently from Yonhap, one of the largest news networks, but no link. Apparently the second such incident, but no mention of what the first was. Editendum: BBC reporting [0] on it somewhat calmly gives the core story some credibility. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67354709 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67354709
- eichin 3y agohttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67354709 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67354709 also quotes "South Korean news agency Yonhap", and quotes statements from "the Donggoseong Export Agricultural Complex, which owns the plant" - and gives "In March, a South Korean man in his 50s suffered serious injuries after getting trapped by a robot while working at an automobile parts manufacturing plant" as additional detail of the previous incident. (That may not be enough to find earlier articles, or maybe they're just eclipsed by the current one.)
- kragen 3y agopossibly the korean reporters didn't want the man's family to find out by watching the evening news
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 3y agoServo based systems are both incredibly power and incredibly fast. So fast that if you've never seen a servo based arm move at top speed and come to that top speed at top acceleration you'd be forgiven to think that I'm exaggerating. Depending on the application there are different layers of safety surrounding these systems, including perimeter guards, optical barriers, limit switches, resistance based detection and so on. But when a system is broken someone has to go in and fix it, and you tend to do that with the robot powered up, some of the safety systems disabled so you can actually work on it and if you're really unlucky a motor will end up shorted against a + or - rail while you're within reach. This is obviously dangerous, and it is more dangerous because broken equipment can't be trusted to behave in a predictable way. They won't stop. Not until whatever is obstructing has moved or the motor has burned out (or someone has the presence of mind to hit the e-stop). I've seen a 3" thick mount that must have weighed well over a ton sheared clear of its bolts (which themselves were an inch thick) by a malfunctioning servo on a very large lathe under construction (think 8 foot chuck for crane cable idler wheels). Do not fuck with servo systems unless you are 100% sure they are safe to approach or you may well end up dead or gravely injured.
- crotchfire 3y ago> and you tend to do that with the robot powered up I thought OSHA and friends didn't allow this. Lockout/tagout is standard. > some of the safety systems disabled There's a simple one which ought to be more common: current limiter on the drive power supply. Makes everything slow and weak.
- seabird 3y agoOSHA doesn't allow it but people still do it constantly, they usually just take steps to make sure they don't end up dead.
- userinanother 3y agoThey can’t fine any meaningful amount anyway. The paperwork costs more to process than the fine
- crotchfire 3y ago[flagged]
- seabird 3y agoWhy is this in the news? The worker didn't LOTO or wasn't given provisions to, fucked up, and the inevitable happened. I guess it's kind of noteworthy that this same facility has had it happen twice?
- gpvos 3y agoLOTO = lock out, tag out = turn off the machine's power supply and make sure the person in the dangerous area holds the key to turn it back on
- karmicthreat 3y agoPeople have waaaay too much faith that motorized devices won't injure or kill them. Even motorized lie flat seats in an aircraft can probably break something. Many of these devices rely on simple current limiting. While this can help, its definately not a guarantee that it won't kill you.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoReminds me of the car salesman who put his head in an autoclosing minivan door to show off the safety sensors. Sure, it didn't kill him. But having your head pressed between two thin metal plates until current limiting detects the skull in the head is gonna suuuuck.
- 1-6 3y agohttps://www.nfa.go.kr/nfa/news/firenews/disasterNews/?mode=view&cntId=193108 https://www.nfa.go.kr/nfa/news/firenews/disasterNews/?mode=v... https://m.yna.co.kr/amp/view/AKR20231108062151052 https://m.yna.co.kr/amp/view/AKR20231108062151052 Looks like he was from the company of the said machine. The machine moves paprika boxes onto pallets.
- tedunangst 3y agoWas the robot even programmed to distinguish between boxes and other objects?
- bagels 3y agoMost are not. Most are just programmed to move a tool from one place to another.
- mmwelt 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231109002258/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/11/08/man-crushed-to-death-south-korea-industrial-robot/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231109002258/https://www.teleg...
- mbostleman 3y agoI worked in a manufacturing facility and those things were in cages to keep people away. The product rolled in on a conveyor.
- JCharante 3y agoI do not have faith in worker protection laws and safety culture in Korea. Many do not spend the money to prevent similar deaths from happening again and I boycott several brands and brands owned by those groups. 2018: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=254434 https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=254... 2022: https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1063392.html https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1... https://www.leftvoice.org/how-workers-and-socialists-are-responding-to-a-workplace-death-at-one-of-south-koreas-largest-food-manufacturers/ https://www.leftvoice.org/how-workers-and-socialists-are-res...