Robotics technician with 7 years under his belt here: these things only happen due to human error. Either at the integrators level (not the proper risk assessment made or poor programming/design) or by the worker (bypassing safety devices to get the job done). Now since this is South Korea, I don’t think they’d be bad off on providing safe machines in the first place. Since the robot unexpectedly moved, I’d have to guess the fence circuit of the robotic cell was jumped out in some way. Either by a hardwire jumper or taking the safety key off the door and jamming it in the receiving locking module. Normally when a safety circuit is broken (Emergency Stop, Fence/Gate/Light Curtain or Non-Teaching Enable Device) the robot has power to its servo motors disconnected physically.
On the integrators side,.perhaps they didn’t interface a safety gate in with the robot, perhaps they didn’t use dual chain safety (24v line and a 0v line that flip at the same time and if they don’t flip within a certain time of another, safety trips due to the time discrepancy). Doesn’t say what brand of robot was being used, but the 4 types of robots I’ve used (fanuc, abb, motoman and kuka) have had force sensitive feedback to stop the robot in the event of a collision. But that’s a collision, so even a robot at 100% collision detection is going to do some damage before it stops, possibly could kill too if programmed poorly.
There is a lot that can go wrong via human negligence of automated equipment. Having integrators and customers that understand the risks and practice good safety is vital to preventing workplace injuries on automated equipment! I’m proud to say the leading industry turnkey integrator I work for always has safety number one with our machines. Normally I would call BS if someone stated that, but we have almost endless checklists and design reviews geared towards safety. That’s what makes a great integrator standout from the mom and pop shops!
It is so refreshing to read comments from other people who work in the same industry. I have seen so many dumb customers do some serious Darwin Award antics with machines that are meant to move pallets really really fast. Lots of stories of people almost losing limbs to winning the award and are no longer with us. Thankfully most of these places are practicing much better habits, but…yeah. You can do CAT 3 and 4 all day with some PL d or e, but stupid still finds a way to willfully ignore safety.
Even if it was a vision system, which I highly doubt it was, there is no way a vision system could mistake anything for anything other than what it was programmed to see. Vision systems are finicky little bitches to setup. Gotta make sure your lighting is consistent and perfect, can’t place the machine near windows or else the sun will fuck up your vision system, etc. The late worker had to have accidentally triggered a box presence sensor while having the robot unsafely bypassed into a not-safe running state.
I once had to male 36 vision programs into one robot. That’s 1 vision program for each I-Beam that came in, in a stack. Couldn’t find the majority straight edges off a layer, no, had to find only one beam at a time. That was a nightmare job. To make it worse, the I-Beams camexin from the outdoors after it could snow. Water reflects light, so we had to make sure all the beams are dried off completely. Lastly, the customer later.decided to clean and update their tin roof with clear plexiglass wavy things. Well, then the vision programs stopped working from sun up to sun down…vision systems are finicky little bitches!
Shitty way to go, but that’s what LOTO procedures are for. You should never be working within reach of a robot arm while it has power. If it’s gotta be in a particular position for maintenance, move it to that position, then lockout all energy sources before entering its reach.
Ideally yes but if you know you’ll be fired for halting the line for ten minutes then you’ve got loads of incentive to try to fix the problem in twenty seconds…
Have you ever been a lowly paid, replaceable worker before? Risking your life for marginal increases in shareholder profits is kind of par for the course.
This is a different country, and different culture. It’s been in the news for years now that Koreans are literally working themselves to death. To the point they just fall over and die. There’s been many protests trying to get the government to step in and change things, but so far capitalism has done its thing and people are still dying. If they don’t keep working, they lose their livelihoods. Some people work 80 hour work weeks in dangerous conditions, just to barely afford an apartment not much bigger than a closet. There’s no other option for them, except to starve.
If you want more context, there’s quite a few good documentaries on YouTube about the issue.
On the other hand… if you were overworked to the point of considering ending it all, making it international news could seem like a reasonable way to stick it to your boss.
It clearly says ‘industrial’ robot. You shouldn’t be anywhere near operating industrial robots. I’m pretty sure this guy simply broke safety rules. All the robots working close to humans are purposefully designed in a way that limits their strength. If this company was doing something else they it was simply doing it wrong. This is not what ‘AI robots’ are about.
And I’m not saying that AI robots replacing people are a good thing when done right. Just that this is not it.
Is anyone else thinking this will be used by Amazon as a reason when they remove humans from their distro centers in favor of full AI robotics? I can see it now “we are doing this for the safety of our employees.” as they fire 99% of said employees.
No? Just me and my crackpot conspiracy thoughts? Ok.
Wouldn’t it be good to automate those jobs? They reportedly treat those workers terribly, so if they’re automated they’re not abusing people anymore.
Distribution centers make sense to be entirely automated tbh. No need to have humans doing menial work moving packages around when a robot can do the same thing. These are the jobs we all wanted automated so people didn’t have to do them.
Now it’s be terrible for all the workers who rely on those jobs, but as the average tenure is nearly under a year, I’d guess that in 5 years there’d be no issue
The industrial robot, which was lifting boxes filled with bell peppers and placing them on a pallet, appears to have malfunctioned and identified the man as a box. The robotic arm pushed the man’s upper body down against the conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest
What a horrible way to do. Poor guy.
I'm not gonna pretend to know the intricacies of corporate South Korea, but I sure I hope his family is taken care of and the company changes their systems drastically.
Crazy shit. My boss had to pull someone lifeless out of a horizontal cnc mill. Doing the same procedure they both had done multiple times in the past. Except the guy accidentally triggered a sensor somewhere, which caused the machine to plunge a drill bit into the guy’s head. I am honestly surprised you can continue to work with automated equipment after something like that, it was just the other guy’s turn to do the procedure that day with my boss as assisting (way before he was my boss and we worked at the same company, so years ago). I guess if anything it explains his drive to making sure we are shipping out safe machines.
Eh, tragic and all but this sounds like it was just stupid design or the guy purposefully turned off necessary safety features (which makes it his own fault). No lock-out tag-out? No laser curtain? There should have been no way for the man to get CLOSE ENOUGH to be tagged while the robot was running like that.
Add comment