Safety Implications of Automated Guided Vehicles in the Modern Workplace: Increased or Decreased Potential Hazards?

In a bid to stay relevant and help cater for global market needs, production and manufacturing industries have had to continuously automate majority of their work processes, thus calling for the need to introduce robots at the workplace. These robots may be human-controlled or autonomous, of which the most common types are articulated robots, humanoids, cobots, and hybrids, Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). The advent of these industrial robots has brought about the replacement of human labor as operations are now automated and human intervention is made very minimal. In the modern workplace, robots are basically used for processes like welding, material handling, transport, dispensing, assembling, finishing etc., to mention but a few, including the inspection and gleaning of structures and equipment. In this paper, to analyze the potentialities of hazard at the workplace even with increased robot presence or automated processes, research was carried out on previously traditional and crude processes which were then automated or had robots introduced into the task execution procedures. This paper has primarily focused on Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs). Also, annual robot accidents were studied with respect to different industries such as Aerospace, Automotive, e-Commerce, Electronics, Manufacturing, Food and Beverage Preparation, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Quality Control and Inspection, and Warehousing and Distribution on a case-by-case basis and it was deemed that a case study on the use of Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) is common to all and can be studied. Countermeasures are then provided. The paper then goes on to address some other potential hazards, the place of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and other Standard Organizations. Data from researchers portray that robot injuries and accidents have been on the rise recently and have not been stable. The incorporation of robots into the modern workplace presents its own risk and can be mitigated or avoided, but still cannot be completely eliminated even though advantages are a lot more than corresponding demerits. It is seen that whilst automated processes pose increased productivity and competitiveness of the company employing them, there is still the potentialities of experiencing hazards in a typical robotic industry. However, the place of occupational safety cannot be overemphasized and thus can help limit or eliminate a vast majority of them.