杏吧原创

ISAAC ASIMOV would probably have been horrified at the experiments under way in a robotics lab in Slovenia. There, a powerful robot has been hitting people over and over again in a bid to induce anything from mild to unbearable pain 鈥� in apparent defiance of the late sci-fi sage鈥檚 famed first law of robotics, which states that 鈥渁 robot may not injure a human being鈥�.

But the robo-battering is all in a good cause, insists , who has ethical approval for the work from the University of Ljubljana, where he conducted the research. He has persuaded six male colleagues to let a powerful industrial robot repeatedly strike them on the arm, to assess human-robot pain thresholds.

It鈥檚 not because he thinks the first law of robotics is too constraining to be of any practical use, but rather to help future robots adhere to the rule. 鈥淓ven robots designed to Asimov鈥檚 laws can collide with people. We are trying to make sure that when they do, the collision is not too powerful,鈥� Pov拧e says. 鈥淲e are taking the first steps to defining the limits of the speed and acceleration of robots, and the ideal size and shape of the tools they use, so they can safely interact with humans.鈥�

Pov拧e and his colleagues borrowed a small production-line robot made by Japanese technology firm and normally used for assembling systems such as coffee vending machines. They programmed the robot arm to move towards a point in mid-air already occupied by a volunteer鈥檚 outstretched forearm, so the robot would push the human out of the way. Each volunteer was struck 18 times at different impact energies, with the robot arm fitted with one of two tools 鈥� one blunt and round, and one sharper.

The volunteers were then asked to judge, for each tool type, whether the collision was painless, or engendered mild, moderate, horrible or unbearable pain. Pov拧e, who tried the system before his volunteers, says most judged the pain was in the mild to moderate range.

The team will continue their tests using an artificial human arm to model the physical effects of far more severe collisions. Ultimately, the idea is to cap the speed a robot should move at when it senses a nearby human, to avoid hurting them. Pov拧e presented his work at the IEEE鈥檚 conference in Istanbul, Turkey, this week.

鈥淒etermining the limits of pain during robot-human impacts this way will allow the design of robot motions that cannot exceed these limits,鈥� says of DLR, the German Aerospace Centre in Wessling, who also works on human-robot safety. Such work is crucial, he says, if robots are ever to work closely with people. Earlier this year, in a nerve-jangling demonstration, Haddadin put his own arm on the line to show how smart sensors could enable a knife-wielding kitchen robot to stop short of cutting him.

鈥淚t makes sense to study this. However, I would question using pain as an outcome measure,鈥� says , a biomechanics specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. 鈥淧ain is very subjective. Nobody cares if you have a stinging pain when a robot hits you 鈥� what you want to prevent is injury, because that鈥檚 when litigation starts.鈥�