A 22 year old worker this week at a Volkswagen plant 1ookm North of Frankfurt has died as a result of being crushed by an industrial robot.
He was working as part of a team of contractors installing the robot when it grabbed him, according to the German car manufacturer. Heiko Hillwig, from Volkswagen, blamed "human error" rather than the robot. However this hasn't stopped the media rushing with headlines of "Killer Robots On The Loose" and the rather inevitable yet tenuous link to Artificial Intelligence wiping out humanity, much of that train of thought down to Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.
But this is nothing new.
Robert Williams ? Who ?
Remember Robert Williams ? Very few will. He has the sad accolade of being the first human to be killed by an industrial robot. On 25 January 1979, Robert Williams was struck in the head and killed by the arm of a 1-ton production-line robot in a Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, USA. The robot was part of a parts-retrieval system that moved material from one part of the factory to another.
When the robot began running slowly, Williams was reported to have climbed into the storage rack to retrieve parts manually when he was struck in the head and killed instantly. Williams’ family was later awarded $10 million in damages. The jury agreed the robot struck him in the head because of a lack of safety measures, including one that would sound an alarm if the robot was near.
Two years later, Kenji Urada, a Japanese engineer at a Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant was working on a broken robot, when he failed to turn it off completely, resulting in the robot pushing him into a grinding machine with its arm. Not a pretty way to go by any means.
No Disassemble Number Five
Robots do pose a significant work-place risk, despite safety measures introduced to limit injury. Indeed, the robot in the dock at Volkswagen was behind a cage to separate it from humans. They are not the only ones we need to worry about, but let's put this into some perspective:
- In the last 30 years there have been 34 robot related deaths, including this week's unfortunate accident.
- In 2005 in the UK there were 77 robot-related accidents, non-fatal.
- There have been over 1,200,000 deaths attributed to road traffic accidents in one year according to WHO
This is hardly a killer robot uprising. If anything, robots have more to fear from their human captors at this point in time than we do being wiped out by an automated hoover.
So please, no more Terminator media frenzy.
