Industrial robot at vegetable packing plant in South Korea crushes worker to death

SEOUL, South Korea — A worker was crushed to death by an industrial robot at a vegetable packaging plant in South Korea on Tuesday.

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Police say initial information indicated that human error may have been the root cause of the incident over the machine itself, The Associated Press reported. However, the incident did trigger some concern from the public about the safety of industrial robots.

The worker was only identified as a man. Police did confirm that he was an employee of a company that installs industrial machines. He was reportedly sent to the vegetable packaging plant to see if the machine was working correctly.

It was one of two pick-and-place robots that the facility uses to package vegetables and export to them other countries in Asia, police said, according to the AP.

“It wasn’t an advanced, artificial intelligence-powered robot, but a machine that simply picks up boxes and puts them on pallets,” said the head of the investigations department at Gosong Police Station, Kang Jin-gi, according to the AP.

The victim died from chest and head injuries Tuesday night. According to the AP, he got “snatched and pressed against a conveyor belt by the machine’s robotic arms.”

This isn’t the first reported incident in South Korea regarding robots. Another incident happened in March where a robot rushed a worker and left them seriously injured as they were examining auto parts at a factory. Another incident happened last year when a robot installed by a conveyor belt crushed a worker to death at a milk factory, the AP reported.