A South Korean man in his 40s was killed when a robot mistook him for a box of bell peppers while checking a robot sensor at an agricultural distribution center, media reported Tuesday.

It is reported that the man is an employee of a robot company, mainly responsible for the inspection and maintenance of industrial robots. The accident happened on the evening of the 7th, when the robot was transferring boxes of bell peppers, and the man was checking the sensor of the lifting robot. During the inspection, the robot appeared to have some kind of malfunction and mistakenly identified the man as a box. The robot’s arm then lifted the man into the air and threw him back onto the conveyor belt.

According to the report, the man’s upper body was placed on the conveyor belt, and his face and chest were severely crushed, resulting in severe crushing injuries. He was taken to a hospital, where he died.

This is not the first time this has happened in South Korea. In March last year, a man in his 50s was seriously injured after being trapped by a robot at a car factory.

If you look at the world, similar things are more common, last July, a 7-year-old boy in Russia took part in a chess match in the capital Moscow, his finger was caught by a robot “opponent”, resulting in a fractured finger bone.

The reason for this is that the robot thinks that the boy has violated the rules, and such an accident also makes people think more about the safety of the robot.

In the context of an aging population, South Korea’s rate of robot adoption is among the highest in the world. According to the World Robotics 2022 report released by the International Federation of Robotics, there is one industrial robot in every 10 manufacturing workers in South Korea.

Robot makers are also among the most sought-after stock categories in South Korea this year. On October 5, South Korea’s Doosan Robotics nearly doubled its share price on its first day of trading in Seoul. Earlier, the company announced it had raised 421 billion won ($310 million) in an initial public offering, the largest in the Korean market so far last year.

Robots have long been used in the industrial sector to complete repetitive tasks, but Doosan Robotics mainly produces robotic arms that work in tandem with humans and can work together to complete tasks from outside the factory floor. These collaborative machines are already being used for everything from making coffee and fried chicken to pouring beer and handling luggage at the airport.

Photo source: Doosan Robot official website

The company’s revenue share is evenly distributed in the world’s major markets, with North America, Europe and South Korea each accounting for about 30% of revenue, and big customers include Hyundai Motor, LG Electronics, and French cosmetics giant L ‘Oreal.

In addition, shares of Rainbow Robotics, which is backed by Samsung Electronics, have surged about 3.7 times this year. In March, Samsung raised its stake in Rainbow Robot to 15 per cent.

The number of robot killings in history

On September 6, 1978, a cutting robot in a factory in Hiroshima, Japan, when cutting steel plates, suddenly abnormal, a worker on duty as a steel plate operation, which is the world’s first robot killing incident.

On January 25, 1979, 20 years after the establishment of the industrial robot invention company unimation, Robert Twilliams, a 25-year-old assembly line worker at the Ford factory in the United States, was killed by an industrial robot arm at the Ford Foundry in Michigan. It was the first documented case of an industrial robot killing a human, and the court awarded Williams’ family $10 million in compensation for a lack of safety in industrial robot production.

On July 4, 1981, a repair worker at the Akashi factory of Kawasaki Heavy Industries in Japan inadvertently touched the starting button of the robot, and the robot that processed gears immediately worked, picked up the worker as a gear, and put it on the processing table to smash the meat pie.

In May 1982, a worker at a valve processing plant in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, was adjusting a thread processing robot in a idle state when the robot suddenly started, hugged the worker and spun up, causing a tragedy.

In the summer of 1982, a British woman was testing the battery of an industrial robot when the robot suddenly started and broke the woman’s arm into two pieces. Ignorant robots can’t distinguish between humans and industrial products, and accidental mistakes can lead to human victims.

At the end of February 1989, in a non-manual factory in Japan, a robot forcibly dragged a maintenance worker into a rotating machine and hanged him. Since 1987, more than a dozen workers in Japan have been killed by robots and more than 7,000 have been maimed.

In 1989, the Soviet chess champion Gudkov and the robot play chess, Gudkov won 3 games in a row, very proud to claim that the intelligence of the robot is not against the human, tragedy suddenly happened! The robot unleashed a powerful electrical current on the metal chessboard on which Gudkov’s hand was resting, killing a generation of chess grandmasters in plain sight.