Man crushed to death by robot that mistook him for a box of vegetables

I thought OSHA and friends didn't allow this. Lockout/tagout is standard.

> some of the safety systems disabled

There's a simple one which ought to be more common: current limiter on the drive power supply. Makes everything slow and weak.

I got hit right in the dick by a milling machine axis lever spinning up full throttle.

Only once, never again. Still surprised something terrible didn’t happen - hurt like a bitch. Shop dude says it happens pretty often though because people don’t look down at the caution tape telling you not to stand there.

All of that is to say that it seems like working on a manufacturing floor with robots has the potential to be so so dangerous. Getting into a rhythm and doing repetitive work all day, it’s easy to imagine slipping and ending up as human soup.

Then we should work towards fixing broken robots using working robots.

The machine plunged into a large block of aluminum at full rapid speed with a 1 inch rougher end-mill. It then proceeded to run the cutting program, again, at full rapid rate. The sound it made is something that I will never forget. This thing was churning aluminum like it was butter. It was literally turning it into goo, not cutting it at all. It did not care one bit. The cutter was large enough and stubby enough that it did not break.

These things are fast enough that, by the time your shocked brain is able to respond it could have killed and dismembered you five times before you can even think of slamming the e-stop button.

The end-mill came out with a ball of aluminum, 2 inches in diameter, permanently welded to it. It was one of the scariest industrial accidents I've been around. Thankfully the enclosure and rigidity of the machine made it so that the only consequence was aluminum that looked like churned butter.

Years later I worked with an aerospace client who uses stir welding to assemble rockets. Same process, except you are doing it on purpose and with controls. The idea is that stir welding preserves the metallurgical properties of the material, whereas TIG/MIG welding might not preserve properties important to the design.

To echo your other comment, since that happened I learned to never trust CAM software or simulations, always run it on air first and, if necessary, machinable wax blocks. Decades later, I still don't consider myself a machinist at all. I am pretty decent at it. It's a complex art that requires time and dedication. I do too many other things to be that guy. I do have a VF-2 and a Bridgeport knee mill (full manual still) in my garage though...

Looks like South Korea has an osha-equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_Occupational_Safety_and_... but I have no idea if they have modern robot safety standards.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/robot...

>One day in 1979, a robot at a Ford Motor Company casting plant malfunctioned—human workers determined that it was not going fast enough. And so 25-year-old Robert Williams was asked to climb into a storage rack to help move things along. The one-ton robot continued to work silently, smashing into Williams’s head and instantly killing him. This was reportedly the first incident in which a robot killed a human; many more would follow.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64430454

(Physical barriers can be tricky to get right too, though - there have been incidents of "worker crushed between robot and inside of safety cage" though design standards have been updated in response to that.)

I have religious respect for those arms, if they're powered up you couldn't pay me to get within reach.