HAL? What are you doing with my spanner?

A research team from Yale University has developed a behaviour model for robotic system that is able to ascertain ownership of property and social norms to help facilitate interaction in human social environments...

For robots, pain is an unknown sense. This insensitivity is also one of their major advantages in their inexorable progression to replace humans. It’s also one of their greatest failings in certain circumstances. By allowing anything and feeling nothing, the robot can expose itself to great danger of being damaged or even being put out of service by an excess of zeal.

Airbus Group Innovations (AGI) has launched a robotics research programme with Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Their joint aim: developing humanoid manufacturing robots. Oofff that’s a relief, the robots aren’t flying any Airbuses yet.

As the field of robotics progresses, robots increasingly share the public and private space with humans. Think of self-driving cars on the roads, carebots in elderly homes and Rumba and its next iterations taking care of household chores. When robots co-exist with humans they need to conform to social norms, first and foremost those norms relating to safety. When you visit someone in their home, you don't take the shortest route to the living room if this means stepping on their pet. And neither should a robot.

Much effort is going into teaching robots natural language for easy human-robot interaction. When robots work side by side with humans they must understand when they're given a certain task. But robots must also learn to refuse harmful or inappropriate orders. Researchers from Tufts University are teaching Nao robots how to reject directives given by humans while staying polite. Gordon Briggs and Matthias Scheutz of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory, Tufts University have developed a mech...

Amidst all the talk about the dangers robots can pose to humanity, two Japanese research groups examined the opposite eventuality of interspecies violence: people abusing robots. Unsurprisingly, a couple of days at a shopping mall gave them more practical material to work with than the theoretical ponderings of robot-fearing folk. Barring science fiction, the first instance of robot on human intentional violence has yet to be recorded, whereas thousands of years of human history firmly establi...