A robot in South Korea mistook a man for a box of vegetables and killed him | Hacker News Reader

A robot in South Korea mistook a man for a box of vegetables and killed him

bbc.com

78 pointslando231945 comments

Despite the headline, the robot arm itself probably has no smarts and is just triggered to follow a routine when external sensors on the line are activated. The issue is that the person may have been unaware that the robot was energized, and there should have been some safety interlock that de-energized the robot while the person was in the robot’s work envelope.

Assuming those assumptions are true, my question is whether the robot had separate power feeds to the sensors vs the actuators.

If the worker needs to test/tune/adjust/repair the sensors, and needed that system energized, was the robot built in such a way that the sensor/control system could be energized, but the actuator motors de-energized?

If not, the worker was stuck in a very dangerous position, and was effectively killed by the robot's designers.

Robot work cells are usually cordoned off with fencing protected from entry with safety sensors and trapped key interlocks on the gate doors. Though when servicing these can be bypassed by service personnel which was likely the case here. I've read of cases like these where service techs or engineers commissioning a system were severely injured or killed by these machines. You really need to be extremely careful around mechanical stuff like this.

My first thought was that some version of lockout/tagout protocols should have been employed.

Yeah, I really question whether this story is actually any kind of news or just in the headlines because there's a robot involved, where in reality it's the equivalent of "guy sticks hand in wood chipper, loses hand." Sad, obviously, but not really fundamentally different from any of the other injuries that happen when working with heavy equipment.

Wood chipper mistakes man's hand for a piece of wood

My understanding is that this kind of industrial robot should never be active while humans are near. So one possibility would be that the usual safety precautions were ignored here as obviously a human was within reach while the robot was still powered on.

Yes, as far as I can understand the man and by extension his estate are liable for the damage to the machine and the disruption of the assembly line. The first of many preliminary injunctions against the family should be making their way through the court system about now.

Would you be making the same comment if this story was about an electrician that failed to shut off power before examining wiring? If not, why not?

Pretty sure it’s satire / sarcasm!

Yes, that's exactly the point - it seems to be sarcasm that suggests the writer believes it's immoral to say the person who tragically died did anything wrong in this situation. The poster above thus wonders whether an electrician who tragically dies after making a mistake in their job should also be held entirely blameless.

I am very confused as to why the robot was operating with such power. According to the article, the robots pick up boxes of peppers and place them on a conveyor belt. How does that translate to such force so as to pick up an adult man, place him on the conveyor belt, and then crush his face and chest?

There are clearly multiple safety protocols that were broken here, starting with something as simple as a lockout/tagout procedure and ending with robotic control system failures that should have recognized it was needing to apply much more force than expected to pick and place a box of peppers and also that the thing it was handling was not a box.

Normally robotic arms are either cobot arms or industrial arms.

A cobot is relatively safe to be around. They're meant to work with humans nearby so generally you'd have to be both inattentive and unlucky to get an injury that needs any sort of treatment. But these arms are relatively expensive, slow, and most can barely handle the weight of a typical box of vegtable.

Industrial arms like this are more common. They're less expensive, faster, and can handle an unusually large box of veggies no problem. And mostly any arm large enough to move the box far enough to be useful in your workspace is going to be able to lift way more weight. But these are not safe to be around and either inattention or bad luck when you're around it will send you to the hospital. And both at once and you end up like the poor worker in the story.

Needless to say be careful around cobots but don't be careful around industrial arms, instead use some sort of lock out system that makes it impossible for the arm to move if you're in close proximity because there's no way anyone will ever be careful enough.

So, I don't blame them for using an industrial arm. But there was a serious failure that occured to ever let a person into the area while the arm was live.

I know the difference between a cobot, like what Rethink Robotics made, and an industrial robot. But a pepper and thus a box of peppers is mostly air. It can't weigh anywhere close to an adult man. So the drive needed on the motors to pick up, place, and crush the man would be several times that of the box of peppers. I would think any industrial robot would have limit safety points for excessive drive beyond its intended use. The robots are used to do literally the same task every day, so it's surprising something like that isn't in place.

Additionally, you would think there would be at least some vision system in place for safety purposes.

My point is that there were safety failures at every level here.

Something people forget is the weight of large robot arms, and the gear ratios involved with moving these masses. Usually that ends up meaning that by the time you get to the end effector, the inertia of whatever it manipulates is miniscule in comparison to the inertias of the preceeding links of the arm.

Powerful fast-moving machines will, if you are not careful, one day humble you or worse. I posted on the other thread about my experience with a CNC mill accident many years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210671

At a much lower power level, I had a couple harrowing experiences with powerful industrial grade table saws (4 to 5 HP spindle). In one case it grabbed this piece of plastic being cut and launched it 25 feet at such speed that it penetrated the door of a refrigerator that just happened to be in its path.

You can never take powerful equipment for granted. And, if it is computer controlled, well, make sure you can see the power cord being disconnected before you even think about getting anywhere close to parts that can hurt you.

One of the things I taught my kids when doing projects with power tools at home is to unplug the cord after you are done cutting/drilling/whatever and place the power plug right on the machine where you can see it. With time you get used to not approaching the machine unless you know where that plug is...in the wall or on the machine.

But I wonder why these machines should be that powerful. Sure there are use cases when you need the machine to do heavy work, but in the case of lifting boxes of peppers and transferring them onto pallets, the robot shouldn't be that powerful to be able to crush a man's chest.

> make sure you can see the power cord being disconnected before you even think about getting anywhere close to parts that can hurt you

That plus the cord and outlet being locked out preventing anyone from reconnecting it while you're working on it.

Devices do exist for use in industrial environments that do just that:

https://www.uline.com/Grp_465/Lockout-Tagout

Also, industrial machines often have lockout features built in:

https://www.grainger.com/know-how/equipment/kh-choosing-loto...

What is a man if not a miserable box of vegetables

A structurally unsound box of vegetables from the robots point of view

You are made 100% from metabolized plants, so that's not entirely inaccurate.

Also water and salt (plus some magnesium chloride if you eat tofu many other industrially-made chemicals without plant-based precursors unless you avoid nearly all processed foods)

This already came up yesterday. The man was debugging the robot, presumably bypassing safety protocols in the process.

Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199233

[dupe]

Despite of the headline, I think its important for us to understand and realize that the people who would have built these systems, didn't have human safety around these bots as first priority. A lesson for all of us to remind management that bad PR for a new product or service will hurt their careers more than the bullet point gained on resume for speed and efficiency.

the people who would have built these systems, didn't have human safety around these bots as first priority

How do you know? Were you in the room when these systems were designed?

I do not have faith in worker protection laws and safety culture in Korea. Many do not spend the money to prevent similar deaths from happening again and I boycott several brands and brands owned by those groups.

2018: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=254...

2022: https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1...

https://www.leftvoice.org/how-workers-and-socialists-are-res...

> The man, a worker from the company that manufactured the robotic arm, was running checks on the machine late into the night on Wednesday when it malfunctioned.

I feel like you shouldn't be near it when testing industrial robots / automated machinery, especially when they noted potential sensor issues. Definitely was avoidable and it's very sad for the man's family/friends.

Dup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199233

Wait, so the robot detected him, and turned away from the conveyor belt to grab him and place him onto the conveyor belt?!

In other news, a robot in North Korea mistook a box of vegetables for a man and killed them.

'mistook'

Tip: When the robot's make an offer you can't refuse, don't refuse it.

* in South Korea.

Also posted yesterday (technically a dupe, although that one was paywalled and this one isn't): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199233

(And FWIW much of that discussion situated this as less about robots and more about accidents involving heavy industrial machinery and people failing to "lockout/tagout" when repairing it.)

[dupe]

skynet begins

They forgot to put Asimov's Rules of Robotics in the firmware

Asimov's laws require AGI, so are irrelevant at this point. Our robots can't reliably detect humans, let alone understand what could cause them harm.

A man is dead from some software engineer’s faulty programming.

Or perhaps from his own carelessness. We don't know if he followed proper procedures, staying out of reach of the robot arm, etc. while it was active. Like airport ground crew who walk too close to a running jet engine.

It should have been a lock out tag out preventing it from moving, especially if it was having reliability issues.

This reminds me of Five Nights at Freddy's animatronics mistaking a human for an endoskeleton and murdering the human by shoving them into a suit [0]. Didn't think this could happen for real.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy%27s#Game...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com