Robot airbags could help industrial bots play nice with humans
Making robots that can work safely alongside humans is an important and unavoidable challenge for the manufacturing industry. If something goes wrong with a robot and it confuses a squishy human body with open air, the result might not just be delayed production, but broken bones and torn flesh. In the most straightforward way possible, robots just don’t know their own strength.
But in order to guard against this sort of mishap, researchers at Germany’s DLR Robotics and Mechatronics Center have been working a reassuringly familiar safety measure: airbags for robots. The scientists came up with this idea back in 2016, but last week published a new video showing how the technology works in a collaborative task — in their example,...