Why Scientists Are Designing Robots to Feel Pain
"Joy wouldn't feel so good if it wasn't for pain," a wise sage once said, and robotics professors from Leibniz University of Hannover agree. At the recent IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Sweden, Johannes Kuehn and Professor Sami Haddadin are working to make their robots detect and react to physical pain.
The ability to feel pain is a crucial element of evolution. It grants humans and animals alike the awareness to know when situations are likely to cause them lasting harm, be it scalding water or a broken leg. While the fact that robots cannot feel pain is a huge boon for their usefulness as tools in otherwise inhospitable environments, an awareness and reaction to their surroundings could prove crucial to their continued survival.
Kuehn and Haddadin have framed their studies of pain as interpretations of "tactile sensation" which uses a "nervous robot-tissue model that is inspired by the human skin structure." They've classed pain into three categories, light, moderate, and severe, and when a robot's tactile sensors detects severe pain it knows to contact others for help. Given how robots might be working with other robots on construction jobs soon enough, it's easy to see where such a need might come up.
Here's a video of Kuehn and Haddadin's model painbot reacting appropriately to touch.
At the very least this should even the playing field when they take over.
Source: Engadget
