Re: why has it taken so long ... to draw attention it?
"robots having people in dangerously close proximity are supposed to be locked out and de-powered at hardware level"
That's fine by me, but I suspect it's considered a rather dated approach in some places e.g. in the rarefied atmosphere of the management offices and boardrooms, where consequences are things that other people pay for.
This from page 6 of the Trend Micro report quoted in the article:
"Industrial robots are traditionally designed to operate in a cage, physically separated from where humans work. However, vendors are introducing various models of collaborative robots (co-bots) that are able to work in physical proximity to humans (e.g., ABB’s YuMi, FANUC’s CR-35iA, 13 and various models by Universal Robots; see Figure 3)."
[Fwiw: ABB's YuMi isn't a classical ABB production-line robot; it's a little bit bigger than some of the tabletop robots I've seen used as toys or for training. Can't comment on the others mentioned.]
Biting the hand that feeds IT
