In a shocking development, a man was crushed to death by a robot in South Korea after it mistook the person for a box of vegetables it was handling as per reports. The incident occurred when the robotics company employee in his 40s was inspecting the robot.

According to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, the robotic arm confused the man for a box of vegetables, proceeding to grab and push him against the conveyor belt. As a result, the man’s face and chest were crushed. He was taken to a hospital but later died.

The robot was tasked with lifting boxes of peppers and transferring them onto pallets. The employee had been checking the robot’s sensor operations ahead of its test run at the pepper sorting plant in South Gyeongsang province. There were reportedly some problems with the robot’s sensor.

“It wasn’t an advanced, artificial intelligence-powered robot, but a machine that simply picks up boxes and puts them on pallets,” said Kang Jin-gi, who heads the investigations department at Gosong Police Station. He said the police were working with related agencies to determine whether the machine had technical defects or safety issues. 

The company employee was reportedly running checks on the machine late into the night on Wednesday when it malfunctioned. The test run of the robot was delayed by two days due to problems with the sensor.

In a statement, an official from the Donggoseong Export Agricultural Complex, which owns the plant, called for a “precise and safe” system to be established.

This is the second case of a robot malfunction threatening human lives. 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. Last year, a robot installed near a conveyor belt fatally crushed a worker at a milk factory in Pyeongtaek

(with inputs from AP)

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