Hasta La Gadget!

Face it, some day you, me and everybody else will be working along-side robots. They’re already in our factories and starting to arrive in our homes. Despite everyone’s irrational fear of “our robot overlords,” this is as it should be. The only problem is that robots today are not nearly as smart as we think they are and a powerful manufacturing bot could, without meaning to, take your head off if you get in its way.

No, robots are not trying to harm us, but programming them to understand our emotions, needs and reactions to, say, pain is pretty darn difficult. Over in Slovenia, scientists are seeking to overcome this android deficit by teaching robots how humans react to varying degrees of human-robot collisions. To do so, researchers took a standard Epson manufacturing robot arm and programmed it to “punch” someone’s arm as many as 18 times with dull and then increasingly sharp instruments. Punchees were asked to record the severity of their pain. This ranged from “painless” to “unbearable”.

If our future is literally filled with robots, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to work alongside them without occasionally bumping into each other. As a report in New Scientist explains, the data will be used to program future robots and ensure that they slow down when sensors indicate they’re in the proximity of a human. No word on if the scientist will also program robots that do bump into humans to say, “My bad.”