Horror death of car worker who became first person to be killed by a robot

The incident took place at an American Ford factory (Image: HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Robert Williams was just 25 when he became the first person in the world to be killed by a robot.

He was working at the Ford Motor Company casting plant based in Flat Rock, Michigan on January 25, 1979, and on the day of his horrifying death was working with a parts-retrieval system.

The machine helped to move castings and other materials from one area of the factory to another, and it's believed a malfunction had occurred as the machine seemed to be working slowly. Williams took it upon himself to climb into the third story of a shelving unit, where he was then "struck from behind and crushed" by a mechanical arm, legal documents state.

It seems the robotic system has failed to identify the man and instead registered him as an inanimate object which needed to be moved. According to reports, the machine continued to work away for an entire 30 minutes as Williams lay dead before other workers noticed what had happened. 

Years later, in 1983, his family was successful in suing the manufacturer of the machine, known as Litton Industries. They argued the safety devices weren’t sufficient enough surrounding the robotic arm, despite it moving with considerable force. 

The Ford Motor Company were sued for millions (Image: AFP via Getty Images)

As a form of compensation, they were awarded $10 million, which for the time was the biggest personal injury award in state history. Although with further pushing from their legal team, it was raised even higher to $15 million. 

At the time of the case, their lawyer said: ''I think we have to be very careful that we don't go backward to the kind of notions we had during the Industrial Revolution that people are expendable."

This time marked the beginning of an era where industries were just beginning to incorporate automated systems into their factory lines, and robotic arms were a part of it. Along with it, though, as Williams' death has proven, new threats were presented.

It didn't take long before a second death as a result of a robot took place, but this time in Japan, just two years later. Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old worker at the Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant in Akashi, lost his life to a mechanical arm as he was checking a robot that was malfunctioning.

It's believed that he accidentally turned the robot on after he had jumped over a chain-fence safety barrier in the factory.

His shocking death was detailed in the book When Robots Kill: Artificial Intelligence Under Criminal Law by Gabriel Hallevy, saying: "The robot erroneously identified the employee as a threat to its mission and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to push the worker into an adjacent machine."

He further explained that by using its powerful hydraulic arm, the robot completely smashed the worker into an operating machine. The force killed him straight away before resuming its duties like nothing had happened.