The charges reopen the warehouse control question
WorkSafe Victoria has charged department-store operator Myer Pty Ltd and warehouse-robotics supplier GeekPlus Australia after a worker died at Myer’s Ravenhall distribution centre in September 2024. WorkSafe says a 27-year-old man sustained fatal injuries after coming into contact with an energised, operating automated robot. The regulator has filed charges, not established a court finding, and the distinction matters: the current record describes allegations that still have to be tested.[1,2,3]
The regulator’s allegations are specific. It says Myer failed to ensure that access points into the robot grid had an interlocked physical barrier, and failed to ensure that access occurred only after the robots had been de-energised and locked out. GeekPlus Australia faces separate allegations that it failed to ensure access only after de-energisation and failed to provide the necessary supervision. The filing hearing is listed for 28 September 2026 in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court.[1]
The incident was an exception-work failure, not an autonomy demo
A contemporaneous 7NEWS report described the worker as trying to fix a jammed item on an automated stock-collection robot before being crushed between moving parts. Myer’s public response at the time said it would work with emergency services and WorkSafe and support the worker’s family and colleagues. That account supplies the event chronology, while WorkSafe’s later notice supplies the present legal allegations and the control points now in dispute.[1,2]
Myer’s FY25 annual report records the death in more formal language: a third-party contractor was fatally injured at the Ravenhall National Distribution Centre during the year, and Myer says it cooperated with WorkSafe while implementing measures for ongoing safety compliance. The filing also says the centre had experienced implementation challenges with its automated pick-and-pack operation. Those statements establish the operator’s disclosed response and the warehouse’s wider delivery context; they do not establish that the automation problems caused the death or that the later charges will succeed.[3]
That wider context is still live. A July 2026 report by Inside Retail said the Ravenhall centre was not expected to reach full capacity until 2027 and described ongoing automation and software remediation, while noting a change in Myer’s supply-chain leadership. This is not evidence of a safety breach or a causal link to the fatality. It is relevant because a warehouse can be commercially valuable, technically unfinished and safety-critical at the same time; operational maturity cannot be inferred from robot count or the existence of a major facility.[4]
The decision delta is the human control chain
The ordinary reading of a warehouse robot fatality is that the machine moved when a person was nearby. The more useful systems reading is narrower: who controlled access to the hazard, who confirmed that energy was isolated, who supervised exception work, and what evidence showed that those controls held in practice? WorkSafe’s allegations put those questions at the centre. They move the buyer test beyond whether a robot can pick quickly and toward whether the operator and integrator can make human entry into a live robotic cell physically difficult, procedurally controlled and auditable.[1,2,3]
The current public packet does not answer every technical question. It does not disclose the precise interlock design, the access-authorisation process, the records used to confirm lockout, the supervision arrangement or the contractual division of responsibility between Myer and GeekPlus. Those are not gaps to fill with assumptions. They are the evidence the court process, regulator material or a later company disclosure would need to clarify before anyone could generalise from this case to a particular robot design or warehouse architecture.[1,3,4]
What to watch before calling the case settled
The next meaningful checkpoint is the 28 September filing hearing, followed by any public court record or regulator update that explains the evidence and the parties’ responses. The practical questions are whether the alleged access and isolation controls were redesigned, how responsibility was allocated between site operator and robotics supplier, and whether the Ravenhall remediation produces measurable safety and operating evidence. Myer says measures were implemented, but the public record reviewed here does not yet show their technical scope or effectiveness.[1,3,4]
The case therefore changes the evidence burden for warehouse automation buyers without yet proving a final conclusion about either defendant. A deployment is not safety-ready because its robots are productive, and a charge is not a conviction. The durable lesson is that exception work is part of the system: interlocked physical access, verified energy isolation and competent supervision need to be treated as core deployment evidence, alongside throughput, uptime and software integration.[1,2,3,4]