A South Korean worker was crushed to death by an industrial robot that mistook it for a box of vegetables, local authorities said on Thursday.
The unidentified worker in Goseong died of head and chest injuries Tuesday afternoon after he was grabbed by the robot and pushed onto a conveyor belt, police said.
He reportedly worked for the company that assembled the robot, and was sent to a vegetable factory to make sure the model was operating properly.
The device involved in the accident was one of two pick-and-place robots at the facility, which pack bell peppers and other produce for export to other Asian countries, according to police.
The machines are common in South Korea, which is struggling with a shrinking workforce.
The robot’s sensors are designed to identify boxes, an unnamed police official said.
Surveillance footage from Tuesday’s tragedy shows the man moving near the device with a box in his hand, which may have triggered a reaction.
The fatal incident happened at a vegetable packaging factory in South Korea.AP
“It’s clearly not a case where a robot confuses a human with a box — this is not a very sophisticated machine,” the official said.
“It’s not a sophisticated robot powered by artificial intelligence, but a machine that just picks up boxes and puts them on pallets,” said Kang Jin-gi, who heads the investigation department at Gosong Police Station.
The Goseong incident is not the first robot accident in South Korea: In March, a manufacturing robot seriously injured a worker at an auto parts factory in Gunsan.
Last year, a robot near a deadly conveyor belt crushed a worker at a milk factory in Pyeongtaek.
In 2021 South Korea will have 1,000 industrial robots for every 10,000 workers, according to the International Federation of Robotics – the highest robot density in the world and more than three times that of China in the same year.
Many South Korean industrial robots are used in manufacturing plants including electronics and auto manufacturing.
With Postal wire
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
