zlacker

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+(OP)
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+K2
Only NASA has "development branch" copies of its robots that they use to test things on.

>>Magi60+(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.

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+C4
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+C4
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.

>>mister+C4
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+C4
Thank you, sibling commenters, especially jacquesm.

All very illuminating.

>>jacque+6f
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

>>userin+Gn
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.