Local media report that the victim was in his forties. He worked for a robotics company and was inspecting a robotic arm in a distribution center for agricultural products on Wednesday when something suddenly went completely wrong.
The robot misidentified the man as a box of vegetables and grabbed him. The robot then lifted the man and pushed his body onto a conveyor belt, crushing the victim’s chest and face, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said. It was immediately clear that the man in his forties had been seriously injured. He eventually succumbed to his injuries in hospital.
Yonhap explains that the robot’s job was to constantly lift boxes of peppers and place them on pallets. The man, an employee of the company that made the arm, was inspecting the mechanical structure’s sensors before a test. That test should normally have taken place earlier, but was postponed by two days precisely because problems appeared with the robot’s sensors.
Last March, a South Korean man in his 50s suffered serious injuries after being crushed by a robot while working at an auto parts factory.
