Hackaday: It was January 25th of 1979, at an unassuming Michigan Ford Motor Company factory. Productivity over the past years had been skyrocketing due to increased automation, courtesy of Litton Industry’s industrial robots that among other things helped to pick parts from shelves. Unfortunately, on that day there was an issue with the automated inventory system, so Robert Williams was asked to retrieve parts manually.
7 comments:
Something that really stuck out to me about this article is how much of the controls are involved with keeping people out of the area where robots exist, and making sure that people can’t get into those areas. Even in situations where there is a clear distinction between where robots and people are supposed to be in a factory, Humans still find ways to get themselves in places where it is not safe for them to be, and get seriously hurt or killed because of it. It sounds like most of the safety measures in this field are about making it harder and harder for humans to get to the robots in stupid ways.
The problem in entertainment industry automation, is that people inherently have to be in close proximity to humans. One example of this is an automated line set in a proscenium theater. The line set needs to fly while actors are onstage, and is typically programmed to bring a large, heavy piece of scenery flying into the ground at a very specific speed. The machine has no idea if an actor is correctly following their blocking, or if they are accidentally standing under this machine. That is where the most important part of safety in our industry, supervision. It is the responsibility of a dedicated automation operator to ensure that everything is going to plan, and continue to run.
This article highlighted for me the importance of safety protocols and understanding why there are regulations that you think are too specific. All rules have been created because there was a need to write it down. In a setting with people working above you with all kinds of tools, knowing how to keep yourself and others safe is super important. While you can put up as many signs and gates, the article shows that people will still hop the fence because it’s quicker. It’s super important that everyone has training and a good understanding of safety protocols in all situations. I am looking forward to when I will take more classes on safety and how to keep everyone safe while working. I want to continue working in rigging and sound in my career so this is especially important information for me to have. I want to make sure that I am the most efficient at my job while operating equipment and navigating situations safely.
The 20th century saw the workplace industrialize and automate at insane speeds, with labor and safety standards struggling to keep pace. As engineering and invention left the slow bureaucracy of labor standards in the dust, they have left modern day regulators to pick up the pieces. I think that “idiotproofing” something only works until you find a more clever idiot. The thing is that most automated machines and robots in industrial workplaces are hundreds of times more complicated than the average worker around them will ever understand. Personally, I believe the safest recourse is to separate the work spaces of automated machines as much as possible from human counterparts, and have easy to access, simple controls with which onsite workers can power down and make safe the area in and around the machines. In the realm of technical theater and live events, there are many automated components of modern technical work. What I took away from this article is that the best way to ensure safety is to make sure everyone around a dangerous element is keenly aware of its risks and how to deal with them. Most technical workers are trained professionals, and I think making sure everyone knows what they’re dealing with is the bare minimum step that must be taken for safety’s sake.
Because I've been working in the shop and preparing for run crew it is required that we do a lot of safety training to be prepared to work with the dangerous tools in the scene shop and stuff like lifts and ladders. One of the things I learned in the safety training was about the hierarchy of controls, so I think it's really interesting that that is brought up in this article. And for industrial robot safety engineering controls are where most of the work is done to protect people by isolating the machines from people working around them. There's not really any elimination that can take place and the lower levels are really not as useful. Maybe some training courses in administrative controls but PPE is completely ineffective and cannot protect you from how big the robots are.
It is so incredibly frustrating that serious safety procedures are only implemented after an accident. While I understand that accidents help illuminate problems with equipment and machinery, proper safety measures should be studied before machinery is installed, not while it is in use. To that end, it is also the responsibility of the user to take heed. The article talks about individuals who bypassed safety features and suffered high costs because of it. If we’re being honest, I’ve seen this kind of behavior in theatre tech as well: PMs and/or TDs set a safety schedule for strike and load-out, we’ve called out that we’re lowering the fly system and it is starting to come down, and then people still walk under it. Their argument is that it goes down really slowly, we could always catch it, etc, etc. But the purpose of the safety measures if for if something goes wrong, not when something goes right. People should take this stuff seriously because it saves lives.
Something I found interesting from this article is the idea that the robots ultimately were simply following their programming without knowledge of the consequences that might have if the scenario around them is different (such as if someone is in the path of movement). I think that as AI and automation becomes bigger in our lives (for better or for worse) it's important to try to find safeguards before needing to be written in blood. For physical robots the danger profile is relatively clear, we know the dangers of stationary robot arms so it can be extrapolated that giving it the ability to move around would come with the same problems but on a bigger scale. But I think that we'll see the software world be most affected by this. As computers are allowed more and more decision making power, whether in the form of AI or simple algorithms, it's very possible that a computer acting precisely how it "should" could lead to a dangerous situation because the programmers didn't give it the ability to know any better.
Heavy machinery workplace safety has always been important since the days big mills would have dozens of deaths a year from people getting caught between moving parts. Safety involving motorized industrial machines needs to be treated much the same. The biggest problem points that cause injury is spinning machinery that can catch loose hair or clothing and pinchpoints either within the robot itself or between the robot and its environment like in the case of Kenji Urada and many others. I think that as the manufacturing industry becomes more mechanized and requires less workers it will become safer as the remaining workers will hopefully have a better understanding of how to be safe surrounding these machines. The idea of idiot proofing the safety measures is an extreme but unfortunately necessary thing to do. People have a tendency to be overconfident in their safety and this can lead to many accidents where this confidence is their folly.
Post a Comment