“In 1981, a 37-year-old factory worker named Kenji Urada entered a restricted safety zone at a Kawasaki manufacturing plant to perform some maintenance on a robot. In his haste, he failed to completely turn it off. The robot’s powerful hydraulic arm pushed the engineer into some adjacent machinery, thus making Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot.”
In situations like this one, as described in a recent study published in the International Journal of Social Robotics, most people would not consider the accident to be the fault of the robot. But as robots are beginning to spread from industrial environments to the real world, human safety in the presence of robots has become an important social and technological issue.
Currently, countries like Japan and South Korea are preparing for the “human-robot coexistence society,” which is predicted to emerge before 2030; South Korea predicts that every home in its country will include a robot by 2020. Unlike industrial robots that toil in structured settings performing repetitive tasks, these “Next Generation Robots” will have relative autonomy, working in ambiguous human-centered environments, such as nursing homes and offices. Before hordes of these robots hit the ground running, regulators are trying to figure out how to address the safety and legal issues that are expected to occur when an entity that is definitely not human but more than machine begins to infiltrate our everyday lives.
VIA: physorg.com