Robot kills a worker at Volkswagen plant

[Mr.Cyan]

http://www.sott.net/article/298546-Robot-kills-a-worker-at-Volkswagen-plant

This is really a strange & sad incident :(. Having been to automotive plants before, and understanding a bit about how they are programmed - this is downright freaky.

Robotic arms, are programmed through industrial PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) to move through sets of coordinates in 3D space to accomplish their various tasks. I guess that is why the worker was standing next to the arm, and installing it because he knew how the robot worked, its safety systems and likelihood/risks of that happening to him was slim. Hence for it to actually pick up a person and throw him against a metal slab while under installation (which is completely not a normal working procedure while fabricating automotive parts, because the dimensions of automotive parts are different from a human body) - means that it was "programmed" to do so. The question would be, who was programming the robot's PLCs, and why was it programmed to do so when it was being installed ? The alternative would be that the programming was faulty, and this incident happened - but even then the chances of accurately picking up a person with faulty programming are slim, and im sure these machines have also safety systems, and "kill-switches" installed if anything goes wrong......i could be wrong on this - but another strange incident on the BBM....

 

[patty2292]

I currently work in a car manufacturing plant and see these robots daily... I don't understand how this could possibly happen from what I've seen. They do the exact same process without fault for months, if not years at a time.

They are programmed and maintained for repetitive precision... as soon as there is a variance, engineers are notified immediately to not halt production.

The likelyhood of the man being in the exact position, where the robot can grab him like it should a part of the car, and launch him across the shop floor is very VERY slim! Especially when it was getting programmed. Highly doubt the odds of the guy programming it to do that to him with error... I'm assuming he would have had a set script or data to input...

Strange indeed!

 

[Mr.Cyan]

Latest news from RT on this topic...

http://rt.com/news/271213-sarah-connor-robot-incident/

When a German VW robot killed a car worker in a tragic accident, “Terminator” devotees began to wonder if the machines were really taking over. The paranoia grew when the reporter tweeting the news was Sarah Connor – sorry, Sarah O’Connor of the FT.

The Twitter frenzy started when Sarah O’Connor, employment correspondent at the Financial Times, tweeted the news of a robot killing a human being. The similarity of her name to that of the character Sarah Connor, played by Linda Hamilton in the original Terminator movie, wasn’t lost on the fans.

 

[MusicMan]

There was a case of a Mars probe coming to grief because the parameters used in the programming got confused between the American Imperial system and the European metric systems of measurement.

This possibility may have caused disastrous results such as those reported by Sarah O'Connor.
It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

 

[Mikey]

There could be some Chinese Whisper going on here, due to inexact translation from German to English. In German news reports, the verb used was "erfasst" which can be translated as "grabbed" but it also could be translated as "caught". E.g. a machine, while moving, can "catch" the clothes of a worker and drag him along. Quote from news item:

Beim Anfahren des Roboters habe dieser einen der beiden Arbeiter erfasst und gegen eine Metallplatte gedrückt.

My translation:

While turning the robot on, it caught one of the workers and pushed him against a metal plate.

I don't think one can say "the robot killed" -- no more than one can say "a circular saw cut a worker's finger off while being turned on" or "a car killed a person during a crash". My point: When one uses a hammer and knocking himself on the finger, don't blame the hammer.

 

[trendsetter37]

There could be some Chinese Whisper going on here, due to inexact translation from German to English. In German news reports, the verb used was "erfasst" which can be translated as "grabbed" but it also could be translated as "caught". E.g. a machine, while moving, can "catch" the clothes of a worker and drag him along. Quote from news item:

Beim Anfahren des Roboters habe dieser einen der beiden Arbeiter erfasst und gegen eine Metallplatte gedrückt.

My translation:

While turning the robot on, it caught one of the workers and pushed him against a metal plate.

I don't think one can say "the robot killed" -- no more than one can say "a circular saw cut a worker's finger off while being turned on" or "a car killed a person during a crash". My point: When one uses a hammer and knocking himself on the finger, don't blame the hammer.

Ok yea that makes much more sense. Right now the story kinda reads like the machine came alive and grabbed the guy which of course would be much more worrisome because if I understand the process correctly, precise maneuvers like the ones needed to deliberately grab the guy and slam him into a metal slab would take a lot of code and even more testing to get it just right.

The implication here being that it wasn't an accident...whatever that would mean :/

 

[Gawan]

There could be some Chinese Whisper going on here, due to inexact translation from German to English. In German news reports, the verb used was "erfasst" which can be translated as "grabbed" but it also could be translated as "caught". E.g. a machine, while moving, can "catch" the clothes of a worker and drag him along. Quote from news item:

Beim Anfahren des Roboters habe dieser einen der beiden Arbeiter erfasst und gegen eine Metallplatte gedrückt.

My translation:

While turning the robot on, it caught one of the workers and pushed him against a metal plate.

I don't think one can say "the robot killed" -- no more than one can say "a circular saw cut a worker's finger off while being turned on" or "a car killed a person during a crash". My point: When one uses a hammer and knocking himself on the finger, don't blame the hammer.

I agree and according to German news, machines and humans are always separated, kind of caged/fenced as I read (as it can be seen in the sott article). Somehow two guys did some maintenance work on the machine (setting up the machine) and one was in that so called cage and the other person outside and started the machine and then it came to an accident. So it may be humans at fault, unfortunately.

 

[patty2292]

There could be some Chinese Whisper going on here, due to inexact translation from German to English. In German news reports, the verb used was "erfasst" which can be translated as "grabbed" but it also could be translated as "caught". E.g. a machine, while moving, can "catch" the clothes of a worker and drag him along. Quote from news item:

Beim Anfahren des Roboters habe dieser einen der beiden Arbeiter erfasst und gegen eine Metallplatte gedrückt.

My translation:

While turning the robot on, it caught one of the workers and pushed him against a metal plate.

I don't think one can say "the robot killed" -- no more than one can say "a circular saw cut a worker's finger off while being turned on" or "a car killed a person during a crash". My point: When one uses a hammer and knocking himself on the finger, don't blame the hammer.

Well that misunderstanding took a turn for the worst LOL! Thank you for clearing that up Data.

 

[Mr.Cyan]

Thanks Data for clearing this up as well ! Much apprecited.

It makes more sense now, as the robot accidentally caught the worker during its sudden start-up. I still feel though at some level - that while it is clearly an accident - it is a message from the universe...

 

[Bastian]

I still feel though at some level - that while it is clearly an accident - it is a message from the universe...

Maybe the Universe's message is just that Asimov's 3 laws of robotics are litterature, not reality...