Incident 599: Stacking robot fatally crushes employee in South Korea

Description: An industrial robot is reported to have crushed a man to death in South Korea when it failed to differentiate the man from the boxes of produce it was handling.

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Alleged: unknown developed an AI system deployed by Unnamed South Gyeongsang province produce distribution center, which harmed Unnamed employee of South Gyeongsang province produce distribution center.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

599

Report Count

Incident Date

2023-11-08

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Industrial robot crushes man to death in South Korean distribution centre

theguardian.com

Man crushed to death by robot that mistook him for a box of vegetables

telegraph.co.uk

theguardian.com · 2023

A robot crushed a man to death in South Korea after the machine apparently failed to differentiate him from the boxes of produce it was handling, the Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday.

The man, a robotics company worker in his 40s, w…

telegraph.co.uk · 2023

A South Korean man has been crushed to death by an industrial robot that mistook him for a box of vegetables.

The man, who was in his 40s, had been inspecting a problem with the robot’s sensor at a distribution centre for agricultural produ…

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.