this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Sounds like plant management needs to enforce lock-out tag-out procedure. That's rule 1 of working on heavy machinery, no matter how safe you think it is.
The tech probably had work requirements that made it impossible to actually have time to do safety procedures. Management is always a part of the problem in these situations.
I haven't been in a plant where management tells everyone to go crazy and ignore safety because 1. they aren't monsters and 2. lawsuits. They're financially motivated to do the right thing. When I saw the article, my first thought was this person disabled mandatory lockouts because it's convenient.
I'm not insinuating that. I'm thinking that it's more like management putting on a face to say "do all of the safety procedures. You have 30 minutes to fix this issue" when safety procedures take 30 minutes by itself.
Have you been in a South Korean plant? They famously have terrible working conditions, though they’re starting to fight back against that.
He was a technician from the robot manufacturer, so it's on them for not having a proper procedure for maintaining sensors while the motors are disabled. I can't imagine working on an industrial robot while the motors are powered... That's completely reckless.
It's reckless, but unless someone with authority is being a pain in the arse about safety, you don't have a safe work culture that encourages that kind of behaviour. This is yet another example of the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up.
Did you read the article? The guy was diagnosing a sensor issue, can’t LOTO, you would have no power to diagnose the issue with.
You could disable the motors. You can read out sensors without the arm moving. And if the arm needs to move, do it from a distance (cable connected or wireless).
A human shouldn't be anywhere near moving robotic arms, ever.
The guy worked for the robot manufacturer, according to the article! You'd think would have been much more aware of the robot's reach, and the safety procedures. Plus, I'm pretty sure you can step through the robot programming slowly. I've seen our programmers do it. Please don't tell me he was in the cell standing next to the crate or whatever, with that thing running full production speed.
To be clear, you oft times can’t easily debug live code on a piece of machinery. Unless it was specifically designed to accommodate, 99/100 times it’ll be nigh impossible without digging in a soldering things to other things. And that is usually not something done on a factory floor.
You’re not wrong, but there is also a reason for each of those things to not be possible in lots of scenarios. The article made it sound like it was commissioning test, you have to do functional tests on the entire system, not individual parts at that point.
The machine may not have been able to be cable connected or wireless or maybe the employee cut corners too, people seem to forget this part too.
You shouldn’t, but there is plenty of usecases where someone needs to unfortunately, that’s just the reality of the world.
It's not the reality of the world, it's cutting corners. Most likely management either not providing the equipment or putting so much time pressure on employees that they have to rush.
Absolutely no one is testing robotic arms while standing next to them. They would either be moronic or are forced to (which should be illegal). Especially with the AI being switched on instead of using manual control in that moment.
But work safety standards are shit in a lot of countries.
Sounds like real world to me. Correct? No. Real? Yes.
Yes cutting corners is the reality of the world, employees do it, management does it, public does it, private does it, union does it, everyone does.
And yes it does happen and is a necessity in plenty of cases. There is ways to make it safer, but everything has an inherent danger and nothing is ever 100% safe or have no risk. That’s just not possible, another reality of the world.
If the issue was with the AI, yeah you would it to be on AI instead of manual.
A sensor issue on any machine, intelligent it not, is not justification to forgo a lock out, tag out of that machine.
It is like a shredder that only activates if something is in the hopper. If the sensor can only be accessed in the hopper, the shredder should not be operational when fixing the sensor.
There are many ways to do this safely. All robotic arms come with a disable key that powers off the axis motors, latches all the brakes, but leaves the sensors and end of arm tooling powered up to troubleshoot. Troubleshooting can also be done via PC and watching inputs/ outputs on the program.
That’s just not true, more modern machines may have those safety features, but they aren’t on every thing.
Which again falls on the company not following proper safety, which was the point. This was a foreseeable problem, and the fact that the arm was “looking” for and able to reach for a box of “peppers”, means it was not in the right state to trouble shoot. If the device has no safety mechanisms that would allow safe maintenance then the machine must be replaced. But they don’t have good standards in a lot of countries.
Even in Canada and US legacy systems don’t have to be replaced with more modern ones, only when they are no longer usable and have to replaced do they need to meet new codes and standards.
Just because a new code comes out doesn’t mean every machine is suddenly obsolete…
There are only a few manufacturers of robotic arms, and have this feature as it is required by law in many countries. This was a new installation and I'll be happy to bet all sorts of money that it had it installed and wasn't used.
What model of arm was being used here? Because the article makes no mention and actually talks about a robot, so that sounds like something else than this “arm” you speak of.
There are more to robots than just “robotic arms”…. And to claim that those all have the features of a very specific model is quite frankly asinine.
In any industrial context, a "robot" is short for robotic arm. Those things you see in footage of automotive factories.
They also don't have any kind of AI. It's just a regular (if specialized) computer in control.
That’s just unequivocally wrong a robot is any complicated machine that can do a task. A palletizer is a type of robot and has zero arms.
And yeah they can have Ai or not, don’t change well established industry definitions to fit your narrative….
The article I had read about it said it was being looked at for sensor issues in the first place. It was extra dumb to be looking at that live robot.