Real-Life Robots Obey Asimov's Laws
ICT Results (09/08/08)

Achieving a balance between safety and performance in interactions
between people and robots lies at the crux of Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics,
the most important of which states that robots must not harm humans. The
European Union-funded Phriends project coordinated by Antonio Bicchi of the
University of Pisa seeks to create a new generation of robots that have the
intrinsic safety and versatility to interact with people. Bicchi says the
robots' "safety is guaranteed by their very physical structure, and not by
external sensors or algorithms that can fail." The Phriends project has focused
on the development of new concepts and prototypes for actuators, new reliable
algorithms for supervision and planning, and new control algorithms for handling
safe human-robot physical interactions. Its main area of concentration is robot
arms, specifically the development of a prototype Variable Stiffness Actuator
that emulates the muscular movement of humans and animals through the employment
of two antagonistic motors to manipulate a nonlinear spring that functions as an
elastic transmission between each of the motors and the moving part. So that
inevitable impacts with the arm are not damaging, the project has investigated a
number of solutions, including soft visco-elastic covering on the links,
mechanically decoupling the heavy motor inertia from the link inertia, and
lightweight robot design. "The real challenge for the future of robotics is not
to do something shockingly complex, but to do even simple things in a way that
is safe, dependable, and acceptable to ordinary people, thus making human-robot
coexistence possible," Bicchi says.
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