Incident 24: Robot kills worker at German Volkswagen plant

Description: A Volkswagen plant robot "crushed to death" a worker by pinning him to a metal plate.

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Alleged: Volkswagen developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Robotics Consultant.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
24
Report Count
27
Incident Date
2014-07-15
Editors
Sean McGregor

CSET Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

A 22-year-old worker at a Volkswagen plant was "crushed to death" by a robotic arm. The worker was inside the "safety cage", meant to separate humans from the machines, to install a piece of the robot when an arm struck him, pinning him to a metal plate. He was resuscitated, however he died later at the hospital. Volkswagen is citing human error as the cause of the accident.

Short Description

A Volkswagen plant robot "crushed to death" a worker by pinning him to a metal plate.

Severity

Severe

Harm Type

Harm to physical health/safety

Location

Baunatal, Germany

Named Entities

Volkswagen

Technology Purveyor

Volkswagen

Beginning Date

2015-06-24T07:00:00.000Z

Ending Date

2015-06-24T07:00:00.000Z

Near Miss

Harm caused

Intent

Accident

Lives Lost

Yes

Infrastructure Sectors

Critical manufacturing

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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