New-Tech Europe Magazine | May 2016

Researchers Teaching Robots to Feel and React to Pain One of the most useful things about robots is that they don’t feel pain. Because of this, we have no problem putting them to work in dangerous environments or having themperform tasks that range between slightly unpleasant and definitely fatal to a human. And yet, a pair of German researchers believes that, in some cases, feeling and reacting to pain might be a good capability for robots to have. The researchers, from Leibniz University of Hannover, are developing an “artificial robot nervous system to teach robots howto feel pain”andquickly respond inorder to avoidpotential damage to their motors, gears, and electronics. They described the project last week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Stockholm, Sweden, and we were there to ask them what in the name of Asimov they were thinking when they came up with this concept. Why is it a good idea for robots to feel pain? The same reason why it’s a good idea for humans to feel pain, said Johannes Kuehn, one of the researchers. “Pain is a system that protects us,” he told us. “When we evade from the source of pain, it helps us not get hurt.” Humans that don’t have the ability to feel pain get injured far more often, because their bodies don’t instinctively react to things that hurt them. Kuehn, who worked on the project with Professor Sami Haddadin, one of the world’s foremost experts in physical human-robot interaction and safety, argues that by protecting robots from damage, their system will be protecting humans as well. That’s because a growing number of robots will be operating incloseproximity tohumanworkers, andundetected

damages in robotic equipment can lead to accidents. Kuehn and Haddadin reasoned that, if our biological mechanisms to sense and respond to pain are so effective, why not devise a bio-inspired robot controller that mimics those mechanisms? Such a controller would reflexively react to protect the robot from potentially damaging interactions. The idea of a reflex controller for robots isn’t a new one. Torsten Kroeger and colleagues at Stanford and the University of Rome–La Sapienza developed one half a decade ago that helped a robot arm avoid collisions with people: As you can see, this controller does collision avoidance, and it’s very concernedwith not running into that human, but not at all concerned with its own safety, except as a byproduct. Indeed, an artificial robot nervous system designed to feel pain and react to it is completely different, and based on how humans deal with painful tactile sensations, as Kuehn and Haddadin write in their ICRA paper: A robot needs to be able to detect and classify unforeseen physical

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