"Do Robots Dream of Punching Slovenians?" asks Reason, echoing the question on all of our minds. This references an interesting project, inteneded to, er, "assess human-robot pain thresholds."
They programmed the robot arm to move towards a point in mid-air already occupied by a volunteer's outstretched forearm, so the robot would push the human out of the way. Each volunteer was struck 18 times at different impact energies, with the robot arm fitted with one of two tools - one blunt and round, and one sharper.
The volunteers were then asked to judge, for each tool type, whether the collision was painless, or engendered mild, moderate, horrible or unbearable pain.
This is all very good, in the pursuit of creating still more ways for people to fear technology. However, the Ljubljana team needs to catch up to the stabbing robot experiment.
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