Even if it was a vision system, which I highly doubt it was, there is no way a vision system could mistake anything for anything other than what it was programmed to see. Vision systems are finicky little bitches to setup. Gotta make sure your lighting is consistent and perfect, can’t place the machine near windows or else the sun will fuck up your vision system, etc. The late worker had to have accidentally triggered a box presence sensor while having the robot unsafely bypassed into a not-safe running state.
I once had to male 36 vision programs into one robot. That’s 1 vision program for each I-Beam that came in, in a stack. Couldn’t find the majority straight edges off a layer, no, had to find only one beam at a time. That was a nightmare job. To make it worse, the I-Beams camexin from the outdoors after it could snow. Water reflects light, so we had to make sure all the beams are dried off completely. Lastly, the customer later.decided to clean and update their tin roof with clear plexiglass wavy things. Well, then the vision programs stopped working from sun up to sun down…vision systems are finicky little bitches!