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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
To be clear, you oft times can’t easily debug live code on a piece of machinery. Unless it was specifically designed to accommodate, 99/100 times it’ll be nigh impossible without digging in a soldering things to other things. And that is usually not something done on a factory floor.
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.
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.