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
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.
I’m not insinuating that. I’m thinking that it’s more like management putting on a face to say “do all of the safety procedures. You have 30 minutes to fix this issue” when safety procedures take 30 minutes by itself.
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.
It’s reckless, but unless someone with authority is being a pain in the arse about safety, you don’t have a safe work culture that encourages that kind of behaviour. This is yet another example of the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up.
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.
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.
Which again falls on the company not following proper safety, which was the point. This was a foreseeable problem, and the fact that the arm was “looking” for and able to reach for a box of “peppers”, means it was not in the right state to trouble shoot. If the device has no safety mechanisms that would allow safe maintenance then the machine must be replaced. But they don’t have good standards in a lot of countries.
Even in Canada and US legacy systems don’t have to be replaced with more modern ones, only when they are no longer usable and have to replaced do they need to meet new codes and standards.
Just because a new code comes out doesn’t mean every machine is suddenly obsolete…
There are only a few manufacturers of robotic arms, and have this feature as it is required by law in many countries. This was a new installation and I’ll be happy to bet all sorts of money that it had it installed and wasn’t used.
What model of arm was being used here? Because the article makes no mention and actually talks about a robot, so that sounds like something else than this “arm” you speak of.
There are more to robots than just “robotic arms”…. And to claim that those all have the features of a very specific model is quite frankly asinine.
In any industrial context, a “robot” is short for robotic arm. Those things you see in footage of automotive factories.
They also don’t have any kind of AI. It’s just a regular (if specialized) computer in control.
That’s just unequivocally wrong a robot is any complicated machine that can do a task. A palletizer is a type of robot and has zero arms.
And yeah they can have Ai or not, don’t change well established industry definitions to fit your narrative….
The article I had read about it said it was being looked at for sensor issues in the first place. It was extra dumb to be looking at that live robot.