Startup uses airbags to protect humans working with robots

Munich

TWO years ago, a robot crushed a 22-year-old man to death at a Volkswagen AG factory in Germany after the maintenance worker became trapped in an area usually off-limits to humans. While this type of tragedy is still relatively rare, efforts to improve safety are intensifying as factories around the world become increasingly automated.

Now, in a development that has drawn interest from carmakers including Volkswagen, entrepreneurs Roman Weitschat and Hannes Hoeppner, working at the German Aerospace Center outside Munich, said that they have designed a way to better safeguard interactions between humans and robots with the aim of allowing them to work more closely.