The dead­man switch is a ser­vo pow­er ON/OFF switch locat­ed at the back of some teach pen­dants. Its pur­pose is to safe­guard the robot oper­a­tor dur­ing the train­ing phase.

While in teach mode, robot ser­vo pow­er remains on while the dead­man switch is pressed. How­ev­er, the pow­er shuts off when the dead­man switch is released. Dur­ing man­u­al manip­u­la­tion or block oper­a­tion, the oper­a­tor can imme­di­ate stop the oper­a­tion by releas­ing this switch.