Japan’s Robot Safety Center Thinks It Can Protect You
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 29 of December , 2010 at 1:54 am
Robots are potentially dangerous, but it’s usually hard to tell just how dangerous they are. You can make up as many ludicrous warnings as you want, but the only way to tell for sure is to let the robots just beat on people a whole bunch and see how bad it gets. At least that way, you get a worst-case scenario.
If you’re not quite that brave, you can be like Japan and use crash test dummies in a specially designed facility instead. Less entertaining and less accurate, but also less risk of death, and that’s probably good. Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Automobile Research Institute (JARI) have all banded together and decided that it would be kinda cool to form a Robot Safety Center to test out robots to make sure that, among other things, they won’t go bonkers and kill you every time you turn on your microwave.
Most joking aside, this is a serious first step towards the acceptance of an industry that will (hopefully) be producing large consumer robots sometime in the near future. You’re probably not worried about your Roomba breaking your ankles, but when you’ve got something the size of a PR2 grabbing beers for you, it’s good to know just exactly how hard and how accurately it’s capable of chucking a bottle, you know?
For better or worse, this type of testing also means that we’re going to have to have to make some serious (and legally binding) decisions about what happens if a safety certified robot has an accident and hurts someone. At the moment, issues like these are a significant roadblock to the development of consumer robots: why should companies spend a bunch of money developing an awesome robot if they’ll be sued into oblivion the first time one of their creations has a little accident? There needs to be some sort of legal framework in place to deal with this stuff before it happens, and knowing what can go wrong is a good way to help plan for what might go wrong.
VIA [ Plastic Pals ]
Comments (2)
Category: Research
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Comment by web design
Made Monday, 21 of November , 2011 at 3:42 pm
This was a really nice post.
Comment by Andrew A. Sailer
Made Thursday, 8 of December , 2011 at 5:29 pm
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