Helping robots understand their work will lead to safer workplaces

Currently, robots in industry are basically dumb machines: they do whatever their controlling algorithms tell them to do and no more, with no understanding of why they are doing it. But in order to work alongside humans safely, robotic systems will have to be much smarter, according to a new study from the National Centre for Nuclear Robotics at the University of Birmingham.

A team led by Dr Valerio Ortenzi has looked at how robots grasp objects and the actions to which that grasping is linked, and as they explain in Nature Machine Intelligence, they have come to the conclusion that a drastic change in the philosophy of robotics may be needed to make the interaction between human and automated systems safe and effective.

Currently, a “successful” grasp is one where the robotic gripper holds an object securely without causing damage. However, this may in fact be a real-world failure if, for example, the gripper is obscuring a crucial barcode which means that the object cannot be tracked. To be fully successful, the system has to understand the consequences of holding the item in the wrong way.