A man in South Korea has been crushed to death by a robot in after it failed to differentiate him from the boxes of food it was handling.
The robotic arm confused the man for a box of vegetables and pushed his body against the conveyer belt, crushing his face and chest, South Korean news agency Yonhap said.
He had been checking the robot's sensor operations ahead of its test run at a pepper sorting plant.
The man was taken to hospital but later died.
The robot was reportedly responsible for lifting boxes of peppers and transferring them onto pallets.
The man had been checking the robot's sensor operations ahead of its test run at the pepper sorting plant in South Gyeongsang province, scheduled for 8 November.
The test had originally been planned for 6 November, but was pushed back by two days due to problems with the robot's sensor.
The man, a worker from the company that manufactured the robotic arm, was running checks on the machine late into the night on Wednesday when it malfunctioned.
In a statement after the incident, an official from the Donggoseong Export Agricultural Complex, which owns the plant, called for a ‘precise and safe’ system to be established.
In March, a South Korean man in his 50s suffered serious injuries after getting trapped by a robot while working at an automobile parts manufacturing plant.
Source: Business Insider
