as it appeared in the September 10, 2008 edition of ACM TechNews.
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. Click Here to View Full Article
