- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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The robotic arm pushed the man’s upper body down against the conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest, according to Yonhap.
I’m kind of lacking imagination how that makes sense for a robot arm that is supposed to lift boxes. Anyone have an idea?
I was curious about this too and went through a few different news sources (BBC, yahoo, etc). Sadly all of them just repeated the same information.
Maybe in a few days they’ll have better details.
It grabs boxes of bell peppers. Those are big boxes (pretty much the size of an apple box) that could easily span the length of a man’s face and chest.
I’m not sure if my sense of humor is broken but the Apple box detail is absolutely killing me.
Yeah I have no idea how big an apple box is 🤔
I think it probably looks something like
you typically find in wholesale stores.No. Apple boxes are big.
https://www.skywaymom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/20150127_1548371-e1613169924394.jpg
There’s four or five layers of produce in there.
Although this happened in South Korea, I don’t know if they use the same standard size.
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I’ve worked around robot arms. A given arm has multiple motions programmed. In addition to production tasks, they also have a “home” position, and possibly also position(s) designed for maintenance procedures. The robot may have been attempting to enter one of those.
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No torque limits programmed. It intended to place the box a millimeter above the surface then release it. The human was bigger than the box but the robot was still targeting the top of a small box.
Maybe it thought the person was a box stacked on it’s side and it was trying to rotate it
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.
You’re right, but the culture at any given plant might be hostile to doing things the right - safe - way.
You’re assuming there are laws in Korea that mandate those safety features.
I’ve never thought of South Korea as a shit place with no workplace safety
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…
If you know you could die if you don’t, then you’ve got one very important incentive to try and not fix it any other way.
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.
I am a lowly paid, replaceable worker.
Not risking my life for someone else’s buck.
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.
There’s always another option besides begging or starving – forcing; strikes, rioting, and revolution.
Different cultures, different ways.
Let them fire you, then sue and get rich!
Ah heck yes! South Korea, the land of worker’s rights and…the Chaebol.
The man, a robotics company worker in his 40s, was inspecting the robot’s sensor operations>
Well, guess which robot gets a big, fat, “F” on his sensor grade?
So he didn’t engage the safety lockouts that any heavy machinery that is being inspected should have in place and got in the way of the machinery.
This is the same as a guy being under a crane and testing whether it is holding something securely by standing underneath.
First rule of fixing things that can kill you: power it off. Before you do anything, power it off. Then, check again to make sure it’s powered off. Maybe check a third time just to be ABSOLUTELY sure. Put a physical blockage on whatever you need to so it can’t be powered on while you’re working on it - zip tie the breaker open, throw the power cord over a pipe or under the machine, hit the knife-switch on the side of the machine in addition to throwing the breaker, whatever you need to.
Hell, if you need to, get your coworker to stand there and yell at anyone trying to turn the thing back on. That’s how we did it when anyone had to fix the cardboard baler at my old grocery store - power off at wall, power off at baler, and at least one, preferably two people watching to make sure nobody did anything stupid.
You’re correct if that’s the case. I re-read the linked article but didn’t see anything about carelessness on the inspector’s part. Edit: Of course, he could have been wearing one of the company’s free T-shirts showing off their products, but…
The machine ‘thinking he was vegetables’ is stupid as the system just loads things onto another thing, it doesn’t think something is a plant or animal or anything like that. It just thinks an object nearby is a thing it is supposed to move and reads the size and shape of nearby objects to know where the arm goes.
What the person was wearing is irrelevant unless they wear a highly visible symbol or color for it to read as ‘don’t move thing with symbol or color’ and even then you wouldn’t want to have it on when fixing it if it was having sensor problems.
Please change the title of your post to match the headline. Currently the post violates Rule 4.
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.
I feel like somehow it being a robot arm with sensors/reactions makes it much more terrifying than an arm with predefined motions that operate in a loop
Depending on the type of robot and application, the torque limits may be way higher than what it takes to crush a human being. It’s not for shits and giggles that most robots are put in cages/behind barriers. Positions are probably also a lot more static/predefined than you’d expect.
I work with a lot of small robots (they fit on a desk) and they will absolute smash the living shit out of you if they’re not set to low enough. Even on lowest torque they can break bones. Obviously they’re caged when used in production environments, but all safety can (and often will) be circumvented by staff because it’s inconvenient for them.
Dumb people always think humans are as robust as action stars in a movie, when in reality, even in 3D printing with plastic, YOU are the softest and most burnable thing around unless you’re doing something very wrong. In anything truly serious like metal work or moving even semi-heavy objects, the forces and temperatures just get worse, and worse, and worse.
It only takes getting to the scale of a car (1-2 tons) and suddenly people are dying with any accident that can turn lethal. It always amazes me when people get flippant towards industrial scale things, because it’s so much worse than car scale.
Not to imply this guy did anything wrong. Besides maybe not powering the thing off completely and tagging out the controls. Though in many places, the corpos make proper procedure so effing difficult to follow if they even train you on it.
They pretty much all need sensors because objects like boxes are not fixed in space. The only other way is conveyor belt like systems.
Modern conveyer belt systems have a ton of sensors and react to what they sense to move things, shuffle things, and stop if there is something wrong with whatever is going through them.
Yeah it’s better with them, but you can make conveyor systems without it. You really can’t have random in space systems without sensors.
Now it’s got a taste for blood.
The robot uprising has begun.
To be fair, I also sometimes mistake myself for a box of vegetables.
Ouch, what a crappy way to go.
Nobody likes to be confused with a box of vegetables.
Fun fact, he was briefly a vegetable.
Ive came across a video before of something getting squished in a conveyer belt. Does not look fun
What an insulting way to die
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
Having had worked one of these jobs, I am all for automating this one. It is hell on your body.
If you put AI in a robot, one that has been trained to walk and plug itself in for electricity, how are you going to be sure it doesn’t kill people? I mean, this robot arm didn’t know it killed someone, it didn’t know not to kill someone… it’s going to be worse if robots are walking around with people. There was a little crab shaped robot with AI controlling it- they chopped off one of it’s legs to see how it would react, and later they noticed that it was identifying people’s faces and tracking them. They had never taught this thing what a person was or what they looked like, it had just figured it out itself and probably knew a person had cut off it’s leg too.
The same way you make anything safe: design and testing. If you’re asking for the actual mechanisms to prevent accidental human interactions, you can look into all the tech that powers automatic doors, elevator doors, and some of the “driverless” car tech now. But in essence: a lot of IR and pressure sensors with pattern matching required for using motion above a certain power/resistance. Essentially when a machine hasn’t determined it’s “on the job” by a very narrow programming and testing margin, it should be able to be stopped from a very small amount of force or sensory input.
But in the end as with most things, the actual results will be people doing their best, accidents happening, companies getting sued, and legislation or standards being written.
I can’t find anything about that spontaneous facial recognition/tracking, do you have a source for that?
I spent a long time looking and haven’t found it yet. I did find this video which is similar and shows that the AI doesn’t know what it is or what’s around it. https://youtu.be/iNL5-0_T1D0?si=BaW8Tn5nacyoGSCB
I’ll keep looking for the one I saw before
i can see mistaking some people for a sack of potatoes, but box of vegetables, that just sounds like an excuse
Potatoes are vegetables last I checked
I heard pizza is a vegetable now
Only in public schools in the US
The cleansing has begun
