WHEN Wanda Holbrook went to work on July 7, 2015 she expected it to be just a regular Tuesday.

Instead the freelance maintenance technician was killed by rogue robot who had veered into the area she was working in and killed her by crushing her head.

That is the shocking incident that sits at the centre of a lawsuit filed this week by Ms Holbrook’s widowed husband Bill, in a case that could have broader implications as the world moves towards a sophisticated automated workplace.

Many people have lost their jobs to robotic colleagues, but few have lost their lives.

At the time of the accident Ms Holbrook, 57, was working for auto-parts maker Ventra Ionia Main in Michigan. Her job was to maintain the robotic machines.

The plant where the accident occurred housed operations including welding, chrome plating, moulding, assembly and testing for chrome-plated plastics, bumpers, and tow bars for trucks.

She was inspecting machinery in an area where tow bar components (known in the US as a trailer hitch) were assembled when the robot “took Wanda by surprise, entering the section she was working in,” according to the complaint filed this month in a Michigan court.

She was working in an area where robots would take truck bumpers and weld plates onto them when a robotic arm swung into the area she was working in.

“Upon entering the section, the robot hit and crushed Wanda’s head between a hitch assembly.”

When workers noticed something was wrong and entered the area, Ms Holbrook was unresponsive. When paramedics arrived, she was pronounced dead at the scene from severe head trauma.

“The robot from section 130 should have never entered section 140,” the complaint says.

For a long time now robotic machines have been working alongside humans employees at industrial workplaces — but not without problems, and the occasional tragedy.

Three weeks before the accident that killed Ms Holbrook a The New York Times article raised concerns about safety as these cyber co-workers evolve from “dumb” robots into autonomous operators.

“It’s the fear of robots,” Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for internet and Society at Stanford Law School who studies driverless cars, said.

“There’s something scarier about a machine malfunctioning and taking away control from somebody.”

Just 21 days later, those words were sadly vindicated.

From 1984 to 2014 in the United States — which has led the industrial robotics revolution — machines were the cause of at least at least 33 workplace deaths and injuries, according to official government statistics.

In one case at a car factory in 2006, a woman was killed when a robot caught her on the back of her neck and pinned her head between itself and the part she was welding.

Later that year a male employee at a metal factory was crushed to death between a robotic arm and the robot’s work station.

And in a highly publicised case nearly two years ago in Germany, a 21-year-old worker was killed by a robot at a Volkswagen plant. The young man was installing the robot when it struck him in the chest, crushing him against a plate.

In almost all these cases, the interaction was initiated by the human. What makes the case of Wanda Holbrook alarming for some is that the robot entered a space it was not meant to before unwittingly killing her.

Fears about robots in the workplace are centred on the development of highly capable, artificially intelligent robots that could go rogue or be weaponised beyond our control rather than today’s generation of robotic workers used industries like automakers to carry out repetitive tasks.

But as robots become more untethered, a greater level of so-called intelligence will be needed to ensure human safety.

The lawsuit filed by Bill Holbrook named five separate companies as defendants in the wrongful death case.

Nachi Robotic Systems, Lincoln Electric Company and FANUC America Corp which made the robots were named as defendants. The complaint also named Prodomax Automation Canada and Flex-N-Gate LLC which it claims was responsible for installing and servicing the machines.

“A failure of one or more of defendants’ safety systems or devices had taken place, causing Wanda’s death,” the complaint reads.

According to Mr Holbrook, his wife could’ve worked as a maintenance technician at countless different companies.

“I had asked her several times to look at other options, but she would come back to me and say, ‘I really feel like this is where God wants me to be,’” he told the Detroit Free Press.

“I want to make sure nothing like this happens to another family. We would feel terrible if we didn’t do anything and then another family had to go through something similar to this.”

Ms Holbrook’s estate is reportedly seeking an unspecified amount of damages for the claims of wrongful death and product liability.