The Question of Robot Safety

An anonymous reader writes to mention an Economist article wondering how safe should robots be? From the article: "In 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction writer." The article goes on to explore the ethics behind robot soldiers, the liability issues of cleaning droids, and the moral problems posed by sexbots.

Comments

Re:gets off on a technicality

[Phroggy]

You should read Asimov's robot stories and novels. It's not that simple - violating the First Law causes permanent damage to the robot's positronic brain. Simple conflicts between the laws (e.g. ordering a robot to harm a human) can cause minor psychological problems, which a robot psychologist (i.e. someone who understands the psychology of robots, not actually a robot herself) can discern by measuring the responses to certain questions. Fascinating stuff. Start with the short stories, then move on to Caves of Steel, then The Naked Sun.

Re:the fence was probably there for a reason

[ozmanjusri]

Did it occur to you that the fence probably had a gate, and the gate probably had an interlock connected to it to stop the robot if the gate was opened, and was probably padlocked to keep people from just wandering in?

Yes, it did occur to me, and it has occurred to a lot of other people besides. I've been doing some work in a facility that uses welding robots to fabricate parts of railway rolling stock, and all of them are protected by multi-zone floor scanners which slow or stop the robot depending where you stand.

There's also an international standard, ISO 10218, Manipulating Industrial Robots - Safety, which specifies distance zones depending on the time required to stop the machine. There's a pretty good overview of how it all works here: http://www.sick.com/gus/products/product_catalogs/ industrial/en.toolboxpar.0003.file.tmp/SichereMasc hinen_en.pdf - PDF Warning - Sick is the company which supplies most of the sensors at the fabrication workshop, btw.