Slashdot Mirror
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?
The regular safety measures weren't in place because they were installing the systems, so most likely they had people working on different things and someone started testing their piece without realizing it was already connected.
The more significant thing from a Slashdot point of view is that Financial Times writer Sarah O'Connor tweeted about it yesterday which coincided with the release of the new Terminator movie and it blew up into a somewhat inappropriate (someone did die) Twitter storm of SkyNet jokes.
fencepost
just a little off
In related news - one of the first reporters to tweet about the story works for the Financial Times has a rather unfortunate name relating to deadly machines. The reporters name being Sarah O'Connor.
https://twitter.com/sarahoconn...
On 25 January 1979, Robert Williams (USA) was struck in the head and killed by the arm of a 1-ton production-line robot in a Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, USA, becoming the first fatal casualty of a robot. The robot was part of a parts-retrieval system that moved material from one part of the factory to another; when the robot began running slowly, Williams reportedly climbed into the storage rack to retrieve parts manually when he was struck in the head and killed instantly. Robots pose a significant work-place risk, despite safety measures introduced to limit injury. In 2005 in the UK alone there were 77 robot-related accidents.
Robert Williams was the first human to be killed by a robot
Kenji_Urada was a Japanese engineer who was one of the first persons reported to have been killed by a robot in 1981
I've been in manteinance in a car factory, and standards are quite simple and secure. You don't enter a âoerobotized cellâ without physically locking the restart key, which is typically besides the door lock. That way you ensure nobody will think the cell is empty and restart production.
I've been in the Wolfsburg plant and it's a modern one, with quite squared workers, so it's very strange that it happened there. In my work life, I've seen reports of this happening twice, albeit not in western plants; it has allways been a breakdown intervention where the worker didn't follow the security rule.
And this is how copyright caused thousands of deaths because the life saving checks could not be implemented.
I feel like a story coming to me...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
First law of robotics: A robot without computer vision or radar may assume that it has free agency to operate within the convex hull encompassing its range of motion (otherwise referred to as its threatened area).
Even if the robot malfunctions due to other failures, those safety cages and perimeter markings are supposed to pretty much guarantee that you'll be safe if you're standing outside them, right? In that regard, one might worry more about robots that have autonomous control and unrestricted range of motion.
Where I work we have a large number of machines on assembly lines to pick-n-place electronic components and solder onto circuit boards, complete with PCB printers at the start of the line, and massive reflow ovens at the end.
Not only on the machines themselves being serviced, but also on the 480 volt 3-phase breaker switch boxes, and occasionally up further on the massive siemens transformers and converters (we pretty much have a mini power distribution station in-house) - all require multi person tag-out-lock-out.
At each point being worked on or powering what is being worked on, a scissor lock is placed on keeping power off and movable arms locked in place, which is then folded shut and provides room for up to six padlocks on it, any one of which prevents the removal of the scissor lock and each and every lock must be removed to take it back off.
Each worker puts their own lock on the scissor lock and similarly keeps the key on their person until a physical meetup after work is completed to remove the locks.
If even so much as one person isn't accounted for, their lock can't be removed, and power can not be reapplied.
There is no real way for power to be reapplied on accident, or because "the left hand didn't talk to the right hand" type of situation.
We once had a worker become light headed and dizzy on the job, and was taken to the hospital.
I was told it was a 48 hour process to legally remove his lock without his on-site presence, even with a witness physically with him at the hospital...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockout-tagout
Right. I've worked on stuff that can crush a full size car without much load increase on the hydraulic pumps. And when I worked on that stuff, I had all the low voltage fuses in my pockets and my own padlock on the lock out lever of the power panel. The machines move too fast and with enough force that they would not notice a bit of flesh getting crushed until it was too late. On top of that, every machine I ever saw (CNC, relay and limit switch, or sonar actuated) had well marked exclusion zones that you just do not enter when the unit is energized... Unless the guy got inside the cage and then closed it up to over ride basic security(cage open=power off) I just can't understand this happening.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
This. I've worked with industrial palletizing robots before and I've seen some amazing failures. A simple sensor not detecting that the pallet had jammed on the rack and the robot then proceeded to pick up the next box and place it at the bottom of the next pallet cutting the entire previous stacked pallet in half.
So imagine my surprise when I heard that someone at my work got fired when he defeated the safety locks to step inside the safety cage because every 6th movement the robot misaligned a box. We have security footage of him ducking under the robot's arm as it swung over it's head to fix the box every 6th movement.
There's a simple place to lay blame in most of these cases, and it's typically Darwinism or suicide.
I was responsible for the servo of an optical tracking mount with moving dome and powered cable wrap (no manipulator arms, just four axes of motion, three of them coaxial) and I still made sure to pump out about 100kbytes/sec worth of telemetry for all the moving machinery that was there. A 5 or six axis robot should probably be pumping out at least that much of telemetry.
The second real question is what their data retention polcy is so that human error can be isolated from electromechanical fault and software fault.