Volkswagen Factory Worker Killed By a Robot

m.alessandrini writes: A worker at a Volkswagen factory in Germany has died, after a robot grabbed him and crushed him against a metal plate. This is perhaps the first severe accident of this kind in a western factory, and is sparking debate about who is responsible for the accident, the man who was servicing the robot beyond its protection cage, or the robot's hardware/software developers who didn't put enough safety checks. Will this distinction be more and more important in the future, when robots will be more widespread?

Comments

perhaps the first severe accident of this kind???

[sribe]

Are you kidding me? No, it is most certainly NOT the first severe accident with industrial robots. Seriously, thousands and thousands of factories using them, why in the hell would anybody think for a second that accidents had never before happened??? I guess the submitter is so sheltered that he has no clue at all about what it is like to do physical labor in a place that makes actual things!

Exactly.

[Dr. Manhattan]

If you're working on the equipment, and it shouldn't move, you put a padlock, with a nametag, on the switch and physically lock the power out. You take the key with you into the workcell, and only you are allowed to remove that lock.

If the robot must be moving (typically, when you're teaching the robot the path it should follow), then every single person in the workcell must have an active deadman switch (anyone lets go, the robot emergency-stops). And you run the program at 10% speed so that you have time to trip the deadman or get out of the way. The workcell itself is fenced off, usually with either a tripwire or electric-eye switch that will e-stop the robot if triggered.

I used to work for a robot company, and we enforced these rules religiously. When I went to visit plants and work on the robots, they issued me my own padlock and tags for lockout/tagout. Someone had to have skipped some safety procedures in this case.

Indeed, in most places, a bug where the system crashes is the most severe possible bug. When dealing with robots, that's only the second most severe. The most severe were "unexpected motion" bugs, where the robot didn't follow the path in the correct way or otherwise didn't behave predictably. Those got everybody's attention.

Re: It's that time...

[Anonymous Coward]

What we call industrial "robots" really are just fancy remote control/programmed toys. They got slightly more smarts than a woodchipper. They follow a programmed dance --rather stupidly. If something is between them and the next step they go THRU it with 500-1000lbs of force.