Robot attacked Swedish factory worker
Written by Neal Babcock
From the Swedish site “The Local”
A Swedish company was fined $3,000 after a robot malfunctioned and “attacked” one of its maintenance workers.
Apparently, the worker thought that he had cut power to the robot. He walked into the cell and the robot grabbed him by the head . . . ouch.
Don’t you love a good headline?
The dictionary says:
attack verb [ trans. ]
• take aggressive action against (a place or enemy forces) with weapons or armed force, typically in a battle or war
• act against aggressively in an attempt to injure or kill
I am pretty convinced that the robot does not have the capacity for aggression.
It makes a great headline, though.
I am glad the guy wasn’t hurt too badly. It sounds like the company got off pretty cheaply, with only a $3,000 fine.
The lesson here seems to be that safety procedures were violated.
Still, you have to wonder how that happened. There must be a safety gate that surrounded this robot. Did he defeat the safety gate, or tie off a limit switch, and then walk into the robot’s reach?
These are tough cases for programmers. There will always be someone who will defeat a safety circuit.
At the minimum, make sure your programming and/or your control circuit design meets some accepted standard, like the NEC or NFPA 79.
If you end up in court, you can at least argue that you followed the best safety guidelines available.
