Discover, October 14 2010.
How much harm would a robot cause, if a robot could cause harm? Ok, admittedly that’s not as good of a tongue twister as the woodchuck chucking wood, but it’s a legitimate question being posed by researchers in Slovenia. In Slovenia, where electronic gadgets smack you.
Borut Povše at the University of Ljubljana has been testing the punching ability of an industrial-strength robot, inflicting everything from mild to unbearable pain on six of his colleagues and measuring how much they said it hurt. Povše told New Scientist’s Paul Marks that robots need to learn their limits to safely work side by side with humans. Read More >