Fox News
A West Milwaukee pizza factory worker was tragically killed after being crushed by a robotic machine on shift, authorities confirmed.
The victim, identified as 45-year-old Robert Cherone of Elkhorn, was working at Palermo’s Pizza’s facility around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday when the fatal accident occurred, per reports.
Police and firefighters rushed to the factory after receiving reports of an industrial accident, but despite immediate life-saving efforts, Cherone was pronounced dead at the scene. More
I’d avoid the MEAT LOVERS PIZZA for a few months…
And so it begins…
Did it throw him in the air and spin him around?
As @SNS will undoubtedly point out, all those time-consuming, aggravating, pain-in-the-ass safety features and practices exist to keep people from killing themselves.
Industrial robots don’t even know you’re there and will simply keep doing what they’re programmed to do unless your body parts or corpse jams the works.
Oh man, this is ripe for sick jokes. Have you ever wondered how sausage is made? STOP IT, don’t go there STP! Sorry, it won’t happen again.
That does it, I’m unplugging Alexa.
My wife and I occasionally eat a Palermo’s pepperoni and sausage with thin crust. They make a killer pizza!
I ran a printing press for a couple of years, and the guards and shields were never used. A lot of the old timers had bits of of fingers missing.
Uncle AL
Friday, 19 September 2025, 18:13 at 6:13 pm
…what Uncle Al says. Industrial robots stay in one place and move in very predictable, repetitious ways that should be VERY familiar to a person of the stated longevity, unless it was a new area to him or a new cell had been installed.
There is a LOT of safety equipment surrounding active robot cells, and anything but collaborative robots (that have proximity sensors that slow them on your approach, stop them if you continue, and have size and speed restrictions) is surrounded by fences and gates hard-wired to kill switches if they are legally designed, to make it STOP if you enter.
There is one weak spot, though, and that is there are sometimes openings that larger work pieces and pallets need to move through, but these are typically guarded by light curtains with timed directional muting switches to shut them off when a piece moves through, but ONLY in a certain sequence and ONLY in a certain direction and ONLY at a certain height and speed.
But theres a problem.
Most cells so equipped WILL stop when the curtains are passed through, but do NOT know if you are inside or outside. This means if you are fool enough to walk into an active cell it WILL stop, but since you did NOTHING to disable the cell a co-worker CAN start it up again, with YOU now inside it.
And as Al says, the robot neither knows nor cares if you are in the way, and it is MUCH stronger and faster than you.
My boss had a Sanitor go into one like this on break, and he was ducked down behind the pallets cleaning something and no one knew he was there. They started up on return and, happily, the boss saw him and slammed the E-stop when he saw the surprised guy pop his head up. When interviewed later, the guy asked, “that wouldnt hurt me, would it?”.
He doesnt work there any more, and I got to put some mirrors and fancy switches all over in the aftermath.
The NORMAL process is to open the hardwired door switch and place a lock on it to prevent anyone from being able to close it. Forget the lock and they may slam the door and seal your fate.
But the guy was there a long time, and familiarity breeds contempt. Contempt leads to complacency, and THAT gets you dead. There was a guy at a Volkswagen plant who was on a line where the tooling grabbed a large part on the other side of a fence near him, and sometimes disturbed others so it would fault on the next pick. Rather than stop and enter or fix the issue, it became a common practice to reach through a fence gap and correct the stack before the robot got back.
Well, one time he misjudged his timing, and it was the last time he ever did anything in this world again.
And sometimes, safteys are WILLFULLY bypassed, with tragic results.
…there was another fellow in a large parts warehouse where the parts were picked and moved by automated vehicles. The vehicles were inside a gate that depowwred them if opened, and so they had NO detectors on them for people as it wasnt supposed to be a human occupied space.
One day the fellow wanted to get something, we will never know what or why, without using tgr robots or interrupting them for a long time. So he devised a pulley system to allow himself to relatch the door from the inside by pulling a rope, repowering the vehicles.
They know this because it was still there when they went to get his body.
…or maybe a suicide.
A Bumblebee tuna worker took a flashlight and crawled into an active process vessel served by an AGV system that automatically loaded the retorts with large pallets, that then closed and started automatically. No one knew he was there until his car was noted in the parking lot after his shift, and a search failed to turn him up.
Until the retort opened.
…its a toss whether he was crushed to death by the loading, ripped apart by the chains, or was still alive when the door slammed shut and the steam valve opened. Not a lot of autopsying you can do with a guy whose had the flesh steamed off his bones. Because he was there a lomg time and knew the system and there was no reason for him to be in there, some say accident, others say suicide; but either way, he went somewhere he wasnt supposed to be in a manner he wasnt supposed to do, so he ended his shift in a fluid containment bag.
…these are just SOME examples, there arw many more, and poor design, worse maintenance, careless wiring, and penny pinching employers who dont train or supervise their folks can ALL cause injuries and fatalities.
But in every case, the problem is a person getting too close to a robot when they shouldnt.
Robot doesnt know. Robot doesnt care.
Robot will kill you and not even slow down.
Its on YOU to stay awsy from IT.
Every time.
I’ve been in the manufacturing biz since Christ was a kid. I have a few stories to tell.
^
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’…
Isn’t there some kind of lock out mechanism to shut stuff like this down while it’s being maintenanced / inspected?
I’m sure OSHA will have something to say about this accident.
…sometimes a guy doesnt think in a self-induced emergency, too. We had this one guy who told the door on a process vessel to swing shut, then reached in as it did so to pick a pouch off the stack. He misjudged his timing and the door closed on his arm.
It DID have a pressure relief on it so it did no actual damage, but it DID trip out with the rim of the door above his elbow so he couldnt pull it out.
Thing is, dude was trapped FACING a panel under the door control, with his nose practically pushed against the SINGLE large, red button on it, and bracing himself with his free hand on the metal next to it.
It was an EMERGENCY STOP button, labeled as an EMERGENCY STOP button.
And dude.
Never.
Pressed.
It.
Dr. Tar
Friday, 19 September 2025, 20:00 at 8:00 pm
“Isn’t there some kind of lock out mechanism to shut stuff like this down while it’s being maintenanced / inspected?”
…Im sure there was. There are required lock out/tag out manuals in MY state for maintenance, written procedures for in-process entry, padlocks for EVERY OPERATOR hanging next to EVERY DOOR, recurrent training for both procedures, an EHS staff to enforce it, and in-plant USDA inspectors who are also empowered to enforce OSHA regulations among other things.
…but there is no way to prevent a kid from just ignoring the lock and walking into the cell if he wants to, in which case there is nothing stopping someone ELSE from closing the door and starting up if he doesnt know the kids in there…
…you can put all the interlocks you want on something, write all the procedures, do all the training, but you cant fix the stupid.
…I used to do a training thing with new operators. I would open the control panel up and show them the PLC, the Windows based HMI, the servo drives, all these wonderful programmable devices and describe each one, then ask, “So, what is there on this machine that actually does the thinking?”
They would pick one or the other, then I would say “Wrong. The only thing that does the thinking on this machine is YOU”.
And thats the TRUTH.
Machines are faster, stronger, more tireless than any human can ever be.
The only thing a human has over it is that they are SMARTER.
Machines follow programmed instructions; machines do NOT “think”.
For your own safety, when around one, see that YOU do.
“I’m sure OSHA will have something to say about this accident.”
OSHA causes this. Their lock out tag out shit fing stops production. So biz owners circumvent it. Employers don’t want their workforce injured. That costs a lot of money. But the OSHA bull shit makes it impossible to run automated machinery. Back in the day we had over 30 CNC’s. Every freaken one of them we had to circumvent the safety required shit. You couldn’t set up the machines otherwise.
#robotlivesmatter
I also work in automation and have stories to tell.
Thing is, we’ve come a long way with safety.
Safety relays with redundant switches are now in place where a single normally open or closed switch, that could fail relatively easily, used to be.
For these switches to work, the whole safety chain much be uncompromised.
Safe-torque-off drives, light curtains, LOTO, Safety PLC’s, etc. do save lives, be it electrical or mechanical.
Not sure what would be worse, being crushed or electrocuted?
SNS, as a PLC programmer I must say that is where the brains and controls “mostly” remain.
That said, imbedded intelligent and “smart” devices blur the lines sometime.
Take a VFD, it’s configuration and parameters should ideally reside in the PLC.
That way it’s pretty much plug and play to replace a drive.
Also remote I/O may be networked in and allowed to work independently.
In oil & gas, for the machinery to function it all must be operational.
In a production bottling plant it’s amazing that some systems can be down and yet they work around them.
You can have a dozen or more faults or warnings going on yet the process rolls on…
FYI, some of the current safety guarding standards:
ISO 13849-1
IEC 62061
ANSI B11
OSHA 29 CFR 1910 Subpart O.
I earned my living as a Die Maker. The apprenticeship at the facility I hired into was pretty well rounded. In the 7,328 hours it took to become a journeyman, we got time on machining equipment, building dies, performing tryout on dies and there was an enormous stamping operation. We trained/worked there troubleshooting and doing repairs. We also built, repaired and performed troubleshooting on mechanical handling equipment. About the only phase of our work we did not perform was welding.
I’m an apprentice with literally 2 weeks on the job and everything is really new to me. I had worked in jobs of a mechanical nature prior to getting the apprenticeship but when I got hired, I thought a Die Maker made tools for cutting external threads on round stock. I get sent out to the pressroom one morning and the boss tells me that unfortunately, he does not have a journeyman for me to work with that day as he’s short-handed. But, he tells me, he will show me exactly what it is he needs from me that day.
He takes me out to an enormous stamping press with a die in it. I need to crawl into this thing and perform some minor work on the upper half. I need to get in and lay on my back and grind, stone and polish overhead and then prove out the repair. I’d never seen a stamping press in my life prior. I’d only ever seen a die a few weeks ago.
He shows me how to operate the press and that I need to put some magnesium blocks in across corners in the die and lock out the press to make it safe to work in the die. Seems simple enough.
I perform the safety functions, crawl in, perform the work and then undo the safety functions, cycle the die over and I find that I don’t quite have it where it needs to be yet. So I eagerly crawl back in the die.
A guy working in the area comes up to the front of the press and gets my attention. He’s twirling his finger in a circle. I ask him what it is he’s trying to tell me and he says that I’m inside the die with the press running.
Being new to the job and not having anyone to work with, I got so caught up in the work I was performing that I completely forgot to perform the safety features on my second whack at it. No blocks, no motor turned off, no lock. If that press had cycled, I’d have been nothing but a big glob of pink foam.
I think about that from time to time.
LocoBlancoSaltine
Saturday, 20 September 2025, 0:21 at 12:21 am
“SNS, as a PLC programmer I must say that is where the brains and controls “mostly” remain.”
…and as a PLC programmer, I think you could agree with me that your programming is anticipatory and has to operate under the assumption that your inputs and outputs are working nomally, AND that you cant anticipate what you cant see? A drop of dried water can wig out some photo eyes, and you cant anticipate a whole-ass human next to your robot if you dont have a sensor for it and another human hits the GO button after he walks through the light curtain and stays on the other side?
“That said, imbedded intelligent and “smart” devices blur the lines sometime.
Take a VFD, it’s configuration and parameters should ideally reside in the PLC.
That way it’s pretty much plug and play to replace a drive.”
…this isnt really a safety thing and I DO like systems set up like this, but Allen Bradley has a way of obsoleting things and even rejecting some replacement drives based on versions (DeviceNet is particuarly bad about this), so if you, like I, need to move off a now-unobtainable PowerFlex 4 to a 525, now you have to update your communications protocols and rewrite within the PLC how you transfer parameters, so sometimes it would just be easier if it resided in a drive called by duscrete IO and analog for a speed reference that you can parameterize to. Also, we have some DeviceNet halflings where MOST parameters reside in the PLC, BUT the drive has to have its address set and pointed AT the PLC to pick up the other references. This is sometimes an engineering decision, but sometimes also a limitation of the devices at the time the OEM made the machine.
You and I could probably discuss this a lot deeper, but Im not sure they want this to be a Geek Talk blog, so Ill stop there. My point is that PLCs are anticipatory, not reactive, and cannot adjust themselves for unprogrammed things like a person in the cell on their own, hence they do not “think”. There thoughts are YOUR thoughts, and you may not be able to anticipate how stupid the user can actually be.
One of our engineers put this best.
“I can program for idiots. I cant program for FUCKING idiots”
There’s always a bigger idiot out there with no self-preservation instinct whose level of dumb you may not be able to anticpate, being a normal human being yourself.
And THOSE are the guys you end up removing later with a shovel…
mystaclean
Saturday, 20 September 2025, 5:40 at 5:40 am
…we are glad you were not smashed to a blob, Mystaclean, but that shows the training component to.
But also, a long-time worker may do the same thing.
Guys get crushed in trash compactors all the time because they get in a hurry and ignore safety issues also. A seasoned guy might do the same as you did, but because “it will just take a minute” and “I got away with it a hundred times before.
And that may be true.
…but it only takes 1 time that you do NOT…