zlacker

> and you tend to do that with the robot powered up

I thought OSHA and friends didn't allow this. Lockout/tagout is standard.

> some of the safety systems disabled

There's a simple one which ought to be more common: current limiter on the drive power supply. Makes everything slow and weak.

>>crotch+(OP)
OSHA doesn't allow it but people still do it constantly, they usually just take steps to make sure they don't end up dead.

>>crotch+(OP)
There's a catch 22 when repairing machinery, you have to see it in action to determine what is going wrong, and sometimes this means getting up close with it during operation. I've seen many techs/mechanics bypass guards and not use lockouts when diagnosing machinery problems. And of course everyone is "ok" with it because they are supposed to be experts and know what they are doing.

>>Magi60+F2
At least as a software developer, when I test on production because that's the only place the bug manifests, I'm not risking my life to reproduce the issue.

>>philip+p5
Only NASA has "development branch" copies of its robots that they use to test things on.

>>Magi60+F2
> There's a catch 22 when repairing machinery, you have to see it in action to determine what is going wrong, and sometimes this means getting up close with it during operation.

This is 2023 and we are well into the age of ubiquitous, cheap, small cameras.

Place cameras such that paths can be observed at a safe distance and diagnose problems in powered machinery without placing a person in harm’s way.

>>mister+h7
I know parent said “see it”, but a more accurate phrase would be “experience it”. What’s going wrong can be very nuanced, and it’s a bit naive to think you could diagnose complex industrial machinery by watching a few cameras.

>>mister+h7
Between depth of focus, various obstructions, details that are too small to notice until they bite you, multiple angles, very large spans of travel etc I don't think that's feasible. It's one of those 'why don't they' statements where an outsider thinks they have an obvious solution to something when the experts in the field are anything but stupid.

What does work is to disconnect the motors while keeping the rest of the electronics powered up but not all industrial robots have such a facility. The e-stop will disconnect everything and that stops you from doing things like firmware upgrades. And when things are broken it gets even more complicated and unpredictable.

Servicing machinery like this is difficult, sometimes dangerous (but not even the most dangerous, for that you have to go visit a steel mill) but not impossible. The biggest danger really is familiarity with the machines to the point that you stop to respect them, that's when you are really in danger. Personally you can't pay me to go near one when it isn't locked out, I'd much rather field strip it and test the components one by one than taking a risk but a service tech might be promised a bonus if they can get it working again quickly and that might cause them to work in less safe ways.

I've seen people do incredibly stupid stuff with machinery and I've also seen the results in terms of fingers and sometimes eyes or whole limbs lost as evidence of prior fuck-ups. And some of those people still took risks afterwards.

Walk into any metal machining shop and just watch, it won't be an hour before you see someone do something that they shouldn't be doing. And in almost all cases it will end up without anything being damaged or someone being injured. One more step on the 'normalization of deviation' track. It always ends the same.

>>crotch+(OP)
> I thought OSHA and friends didn't allow this. Lockout/tagout is standard.

Yes it is, for plant workers it is a firing offense in many places.

But your typical maintenance tech that is supposed to work on the machinery itself rather than just to be using it may well use lockout/tagout to ensure that the machine is powered off when they are working on it and don't need to be able to do any kind of diagnostics. But short of a complete disassembly and testing each component in isolation - for which there often isn't really time and which given the pressure on maintenance technicians to get a piece of gear working again - people tend to take shortcuts such as to hook up analytics gear to a machine that is live. Stupid? Yes, absolutely. But this kind of stupidity is the result of usually many years of things working just fine and bad practices creep in. The guy that manages to get stuff done rapidly is the one that gets called out. And eventually an accident will happen. Weirdly enough even near accidents tend to reinforce the belief that it worked. When actually the lesson should be that it didn't but the person just got lucky.

One very memorable occasion at an industrial plant I visited is that someone got beaten up for removing a lock and I felt absolutely no sympathy for that guy. He could have well gotten someone killed (large 5 axis mill).

>>mister+h7
I would say seeing is nothing here. It will be a lot about vibrations and sounds. Now you could also use pickup mics for this, but I guess it is sometimes just more straightforward to listen with your ears and avoid another layer of indirection.

Now experts will also do stupid shit, but they are the ones who should be able to judge what risks are involved.

>>mister+h7
Thank you, sibling commenters, especially jacquesm.

All very illuminating.

>>jacque+Lh
I’ve never seen a company reward a person for taking extreme risks. Usually they get coerced threatened or do it out of their own volition. The latter being very common just to make the big easier dispite being an hourly employee

>>seabir+M
They can’t fine any meaningful amount anyway. The paperwork costs more to process than the fine

>>crotch+(OP)
Well this happenned in South Korea so I don't know if OSHA applies there.

>>crotch+(OP)
Not sure if anyone has posted the Regina Elsea story yet.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-al...

>>jacque+Qi
Yeah, that tracks. Workers in plants like that don't have a lot of patience for someone trying to get them killed. People always accuse manufacturing and construction unions of "using safety as a cudgel", but the reality is that a lot of these people have lost friends to industrial accidents and they're elected by workers who care a LOT about safety. Sure, they're political and they are going to bargain and pressure in labour disputes, but they are also genuinely fanatical about safety. Some of the most ugly union/management interactions I've ever seen was union safety reps who had personally seen their comrades die in industrial accidents arguing with management who had a bad safety track record and very much gave off the vibe of neither caring nor understanding as to why you couldn't lift four-point hoisted concrete slabs within horizontal metres of workers at ground level, no matter how tight the construction space is. The reason, if anyone is curious, is that suspended heavy slabs where one or straps break won't fall straight down, they swing away from the side of the straps that broke and then swing back, and the remaining straps past their safety limit can break or lose hold at any time. You don't have to be underneath a multi-point load to be able to be crushed by an accident, you just have to be in the general vicinity, so to do it safely you have to evacuate said general vicinity and have an on-site safety officers who understands the physics of the thing to make sure people are standing far enough away.

>>userin+lq
I've seen the weirdest things (but then again, I'm old), including a guy that got a premium per knife fuse replaced (because they're known to occasionally spew fire upon re-insertion). There isn't much context here but between complacency and tiredness there are plenty of ways already in which this could have gone wrong, but outside factors such as pressure (this is Asia, after all) may well have been part of it.

And before anybody sees that 'Asia' comment as somehow politically incorrect: the statistics are pretty damning, Asian operators abroad have less than stellar safety records and very high pressure on industrial workers to meet their (sometimes unrealistically high) quotas and I would not expect them to do any better in their home countries.

>>lucubr+mz
I've almost f'd up myself using a portal crane indoors. I lifted a relatively light rotor of a windmill onto the stator only to find out that the magnetic field of the rotor was strong enough to lift the entire assembly, including a 500 pound welding table clear off the ground when it came close enough. Seconds prior my fingers were in the airgap between them (still quite large). I had to take a long break after that before going back in, the surprise factor really got me, I absolutely never saw that one coming and a very large part of working safely is to be able to predict the failure modes. I hadn't counted on 'anti-gravity'.

Roughly halfway into your sentence about the concrete slab my mental kinetics prediction model already declared a zone described by the pendulum at maximum extension (hanging from one remaining strap) as no-go area. And depending on the state of the crane and how far debris could have been shot out from a falling slab that area may well have had to be much larger still. People that don't understand such dangers should not be in management positions, which is one of the reason why I'm always happy to see industrial companies that promote people from the ranks to management rather than to bring in outsiders with only theoretical knowledge.

>>Richar+Kw
That is terrible, and the fines are so low it's not even serious.

>>jacque+xK
Yeah, "only theoretical knowledge" is exactly how I would describe this guy. He was complaining later that the unions had intimidated him, that they were a gang, and they were economic terrorists besides. I was there for the whole interaction, the only reason he felt intimidated was because he was a spineless coward trying to argue with people who knew what was going on while he knew nothing. He felt bad because he was dumb and in charge and he blamed that feeling on those under him.

>>lucubr+F73
People actually die because of characters like that. It's interesting that right here in this thread there are people arguing that industrial workers can't be pressured because of OHSA but in fact the opposite is true: short of a shutdown OHSA doesn't really do much that scares employers, they might issue some minor fine (a few thousand bucks at most in almost all cases for injuries and sometimes even death) so they feel just fine about putting the screws on employees and in states where you can be fired for anything people will definitely cut corners if they believe their employment is in danger if they don't take risk.