MOSCOW: A Tesla engineer was attacked by a robot and left with an ‘open wound’ on his left hand while programming two other disabled Tesla robots, Sputnik quoted UK newspaper Daily Mail’s report Tuesday, citing a 2021 injury report filed to Travis County.
The engineer was attacked by the robot designed to grab and move freshly cast aluminum car parts at Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas near Austin due to a malfunction, which forced two witnesses, who watched their fellow employee leaving a “trail of blood” after the attack, to hit the emergency shutdown button, the report said. The robot reportedly pinned down the engineer and sank its metal claws into the worker’s back and arm, leaving a ‘trail of blood’ at the factory’s surface and resulting in a “laceration, cut, open wound”.
The newspaper cited Tesla as saying that the engineer did not require time off following the event for recovery.
While Tesla reported no other robot-related injuries at the factory to authorities, the incident raises concerns over the risks of automated robots in the workplace, the report said, citing increased injuries due to robotic coworkers at Amazon shipment centres, killer droid-surgeons, self-driving cars and robotic chess instructors.
At the same time, the report cited Hannah Alexander, an attorney of the nonprofit Workers Defence Project who represents the factory’s contract workers, as saying that she believed the amount of injuries suffered at the factory is going underreported, based on her conversations with the workers at the factory, adding that her advice is to “read that report with a grain of salt”. – Bernama
