TG
Berlin
A robot has killed a man at a Volkswagen car factory in Germany. The 22-year-old worker died from injuries he sustained when he was trapped by a robotic arm and crushed against a metal plate. The man, who has not been named, was part of a team that was setting up the automated machinery at the factory in Kassel, north of Frankfurt, according to Volkswagen. The robot in question is a mechanical arm that moves car parts into place, said Heiko Hillwig, a spokesman for the company. I t is part of an automated assembly line that is capable of functioning without a human operator, but it is believed it may have been under human control at the time of the accident. Mr Hillwig said he could not provide any further details as the case is now under police investigation. Initial reports suggested human error may have been to blame, rather than a problem with the machine. But the state prosecutor’s office in Kassel said that had not yet been confirmed. ‘We have begun an investigation to find out exactly what happened and to determine whether anybody was at fault,’ said Dr Götz Wied, a spokesman. The contractor is believed to have died from injuries caused when his chest was crushed by the robot arm. He was rushed to hospital but doctors were unable to save him. Another contractor is believed to have been present at the time of the accident, but was uninjured.
‘Earlier this week a 22-year-old contractor was injured while installing some machinery in the Kassel factory,’ Volkswagen said in a statement. ‘He died later in hospital from his injuries and our thoughts are with his family. ‘We are if course carrying out a thorough investigation into the incident and cannot comment further at this time.’
Robots have caused at least 26 workplace deaths in the US alone in the past 30 years, according to government data. The first recorded robot-related death took place in 1971, at a Ford car production line in Michigan. Robert Williams, an assembly line worker, was killed when a robot arm slammed into him as he was gathering parts in a storage facility. The second known case was in Japan in 1981, when Kenji Urada, an engineer at a Kawasaki factory, was pushed into a grinding machine by a broken robot he was working on. It later emerged he had failed to turn off the robot completely.