4 ms·

> 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 di

> 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 ago
OSHA 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 ago
  They can’t fine any meaningful amount anyway. The paperwork costs more to process than the fine
Magi604 3y ago
There's a catch 22 when repairing machinery, you have to see it in action to determine what is going wrong, and sometimes this means getting up close with it during operation. I've seen many techs/mechanics bypass guards and not use lockouts when diagnosing machinery problems. And of course everyone is "ok" with it because they are supposed to be experts and know what they are doing.
- philipov 3y ago
  At least as a software developer, when I test on production because that's the only place the bug manifests, I'm not risking my life to reproduce the issue.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Only NASA has "development branch" copies of its robots that they use to test things on.
- mistersquid 3y ago
  > There's a catch 22 when repairing machinery, you have to see it in action to determine what is going wrong, and sometimes this means getting up close with it during operation. This is 2023 and we are well into the age of ubiquitous, cheap, small cameras. Place cameras such that paths can be observed at a safe distance and diagnose problems in powered machinery without placing a person in harm’s way.
  - dansiemens 3y ago
    I know parent said “see it”, but a more accurate phrase would be “experience it”. What’s going wrong can be very nuanced, and it’s a bit naive to think you could diagnose complex industrial machinery by watching a few cameras.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Between depth of focus, various obstructions, details that are too small to notice until they bite you, multiple angles, very large spans of travel etc I don't think that's feasible. It's one of those 'why don't they' statements where an outsider thinks they have an obvious solution to something when the experts in the field are anything but stupid. What does work is to disconnect the motors while keeping the rest of the electronics powered up but not all industrial robots have such a facility. The e-stop will disconnect everything and that stops you from doing things like firmware upgrades. And when things are broken it gets even more complicated and unpredictable. Servicing machinery like this is difficult, sometimes dangerous (but not even the most dangerous, for that you have to go visit a steel mill) but not impossible. The biggest danger really is familiarity with the machines to the point that you stop to respect them, that's when you are really in danger. Personally you can't pay me to go near one when it isn't locked out, I'd much rather field strip it and test the components one by one than taking a risk but a service tech might be promised a bonus if they can get it working again quickly and that might cause them to work in less safe ways. I've seen people do incredibly stupid stuff with machinery and I've also seen the results in terms of fingers and sometimes eyes or whole limbs lost as evidence of prior fuck-ups. And some of those people still took risks afterwards. Walk into any metal machining shop and just watch, it won't be an hour before you see someone do something that they shouldn't be doing. And in almost all cases it will end up without anything being damaged or someone being injured. One more step on the 'normalization of deviation' track. It always ends the same.
jacquesm 3y ago
> I thought OSHA and friends didn't allow this. Lockout/tagout is standard. Yes it is, for plant workers it is a firing offense in many places. But your typical maintenance tech that is supposed to work on the machinery itself rather than just to be using it may well use lockout/tagout to ensure that the machine is powered off when they are working on it and don't need to be able to do any kind of diagnostics. But short of a complete disassembly and testing each component in isolation - for which there often isn't really time and which given the pressure on maintenance technicians to get a piece of gear working again - people tend to take shortcuts such as to hook up analytics gear to a machine that is live. Stupid? Yes, absolutely. But this kind of stupidity is the result of usually many years of things working just fine and bad practices creep in. The guy that manages to get stuff done rapidly is the one that gets called out. And eventually an accident will happen. Weirdly enough even near accidents tend to reinforce the belief that it worked. When actually the lesson should be that it didn't but the person just got lucky. One very memorable occasion at an industrial plant I visited is that someone got beaten up for removing a lock and I felt absolutely no sympathy for that guy. He could have well gotten someone killed (large 5 axis mill).
- lucubratory 3y ago
  Yeah, that tracks. Workers in plants like that don't have a lot of patience for someone trying to get them killed. People always accuse manufacturing and construction unions of "using safety as a cudgel", but the reality is that a lot of these people have lost friends to industrial accidents and they're elected by workers who care a LOT about safety. Sure, they're political and they are going to bargain and pressure in labour disputes, but they are also genuinely fanatical about safety. Some of the most ugly union/management interactions I've ever seen was union safety reps who had personally seen their comrades die in industrial accidents arguing with management who had a bad safety track record and very much gave off the vibe of neither caring nor understanding as to why you couldn't lift four-point hoisted concrete slabs within horizontal metres of workers at ground level, no matter how tight the construction space is. The reason, if anyone is curious, is that suspended heavy slabs where one or straps break won't fall straight down, they swing away from the side of the straps that broke and then swing back, and the remaining straps past their safety limit can break or lose hold at any time. You don't have to be underneath a multi-point load to be able to be crushed by an accident, you just have to be in the general vicinity, so to do it safely you have to evacuate said general vicinity and have an on-site safety officers who understands the physics of the thing to make sure people are standing far enough away.
gustavus 3y ago
Well this happenned in South Korea so I don't know if OSHA applies there.
RichardCA 3y ago
Not sure if anyone has posted the Regina Elsea story yet. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-alabama-s-auto-jobs-boom-cheap-wages-little-training-crushed-limbs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-al...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That is terrible, and the fines are so low it's not even serious.

seabird 3y ago

OSHA 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 ago
They can’t fine any meaningful amount anyway. The paperwork costs more to process than the fine

Magi604 3y ago

There's a catch 22 when repairing machinery, you have to see it in action to determine what is going wrong, and sometimes this means getting up close with it during operation. I've seen many techs/mechanics bypass guards and not use lockouts when diagnosing machinery problems. And of course everyone is "ok" with it because they are supposed to be experts and know what they are doing.

philipov 3y ago
At least as a software developer, when I test on production because that's the only place the bug manifests, I'm not risking my life to reproduce the issue.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Only NASA has "development branch" copies of its robots that they use to test things on.
mistersquid 3y ago
> There's a catch 22 when repairing machinery, you have to see it in action to determine what is going wrong, and sometimes this means getting up close with it during operation. This is 2023 and we are well into the age of ubiquitous, cheap, small cameras. Place cameras such that paths can be observed at a safe distance and diagnose problems in powered machinery without placing a person in harm’s way.
- dansiemens 3y ago
  I know parent said “see it”, but a more accurate phrase would be “experience it”. What’s going wrong can be very nuanced, and it’s a bit naive to think you could diagnose complex industrial machinery by watching a few cameras.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Between depth of focus, various obstructions, details that are too small to notice until they bite you, multiple angles, very large spans of travel etc I don't think that's feasible. It's one of those 'why don't they' statements where an outsider thinks they have an obvious solution to something when the experts in the field are anything but stupid. What does work is to disconnect the motors while keeping the rest of the electronics powered up but not all industrial robots have such a facility. The e-stop will disconnect everything and that stops you from doing things like firmware upgrades. And when things are broken it gets even more complicated and unpredictable. Servicing machinery like this is difficult, sometimes dangerous (but not even the most dangerous, for that you have to go visit a steel mill) but not impossible. The biggest danger really is familiarity with the machines to the point that you stop to respect them, that's when you are really in danger. Personally you can't pay me to go near one when it isn't locked out, I'd much rather field strip it and test the components one by one than taking a risk but a service tech might be promised a bonus if they can get it working again quickly and that might cause them to work in less safe ways. I've seen people do incredibly stupid stuff with machinery and I've also seen the results in terms of fingers and sometimes eyes or whole limbs lost as evidence of prior fuck-ups. And some of those people still took risks afterwards. Walk into any metal machining shop and just watch, it won't be an hour before you see someone do something that they shouldn't be doing. And in almost all cases it will end up without anything being damaged or someone being injured. One more step on the 'normalization of deviation' track. It always ends the same.

jacquesm 3y ago

> I thought OSHA and friends didn't allow this. Lockout/tagout is standard. Yes it is, for plant workers it is a firing offense in many places. But your typical maintenance tech that is supposed to work on the machinery itself rather than just to be using it may well use lockout/tagout to ensure that the machine is powered off when they are working on it and don't need to be able to do any kind of diagnostics. But short of a complete disassembly and testing each component in isolation - for which there often isn't really time and which given the pressure on maintenance technicians to get a piece of gear working again - people tend to take shortcuts such as to hook up analytics gear to a machine that is live. Stupid? Yes, absolutely. But this kind of stupidity is the result of usually many years of things working just fine and bad practices creep in. The guy that manages to get stuff done rapidly is the one that gets called out. And eventually an accident will happen. Weirdly enough even near accidents tend to reinforce the belief that it worked. When actually the lesson should be that it didn't but the person just got lucky. One very memorable occasion at an industrial plant I visited is that someone got beaten up for removing a lock and I felt absolutely no sympathy for that guy. He could have well gotten someone killed (large 5 axis mill).

lucubratory 3y ago
Yeah, that tracks. Workers in plants like that don't have a lot of patience for someone trying to get them killed. People always accuse manufacturing and construction unions of "using safety as a cudgel", but the reality is that a lot of these people have lost friends to industrial accidents and they're elected by workers who care a LOT about safety. Sure, they're political and they are going to bargain and pressure in labour disputes, but they are also genuinely fanatical about safety. Some of the most ugly union/management interactions I've ever seen was union safety reps who had personally seen their comrades die in industrial accidents arguing with management who had a bad safety track record and very much gave off the vibe of neither caring nor understanding as to why you couldn't lift four-point hoisted concrete slabs within horizontal metres of workers at ground level, no matter how tight the construction space is. The reason, if anyone is curious, is that suspended heavy slabs where one or straps break won't fall straight down, they swing away from the side of the straps that broke and then swing back, and the remaining straps past their safety limit can break or lose hold at any time. You don't have to be underneath a multi-point load to be able to be crushed by an accident, you just have to be in the general vicinity, so to do it safely you have to evacuate said general vicinity and have an on-site safety officers who understands the physics of the thing to make sure people are standing far enough away.

gustavus 3y ago

Well this happenned in South Korea so I don't know if OSHA applies there.

RichardCA 3y ago

Not sure if anyone has posted the Regina Elsea story yet. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-alabama-s-auto-jobs-boom-cheap-wages-little-training-crushed-limbs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-al...

jacquesm 3y ago
That is terrible, and the fines are so low it's not even serious.