Man crushed to death by robot that thought he was a box of vegetables.

A South Korean worker has been crushed to death by a robot that mistook him for a box.

The employee had been inspecting the robot’s sensor in the South Geyongsand region when the tragedy unfolded.

The robot arm – which was programmed to lift boxes of vegetables – mistook the employee for one, grabbing him and placing him on the conveyor belt.

His face and body were crushed by the conveyor belt, and the man, in his forties, later died of his injuries.

The victim had been conducting maintenance on the machine that had been experiencing issues for days beforehand.

The Dongseong Export Agricultural Complex, which owns the plant, called for a ‘precise and safe’ system to be established following the accident.

A study in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine reported that 41 people were killed by industrial robots in the United States between 1992 and 2017.

And almost four out of five of the deaths took place during the maintenance of the robots, rather than while they were functioning.

In early 2020, a UPS worker died after becoming stuck on a mail sorting conveyor belt at a warehouse.

Jakob Dakota Watson, 24, was pronounced dead on Tuesday, a day after being seriously injured at a UPS facility in Kansas City, Missouri.

Watson had been without oxygen for 10 minutes, but emergency responders were able to regain a pulse briefly before he succumbed to his injuries.

And in 2018, a factory worker in Bedfordshire died after becoming trapped between two rollers.

Brett Dolby, 44, was on a night shift and had been operating a Duffy machine when he was sucked in.