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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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