Innovation

Does my robot have a nose?

We imagine robots that can talk, think and behave like us. But first, they must achieve the most basic senses.

26 August 2021

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”

These immortal words, penned by William Shakespeare, explain the essence of a human. Fittingly, they don’t apply to robots at all. You can poke, prod and harass a robot all you want – if it’s not programmed to respond to such actions, it won’t. We might cringe every time we see a Boston Dynamics engineer kick one of their mechanical dogs to demonstrate the machine’s incredible balance recovery. Still, the robot won’t respond beyond whatever sensory abilities we gave it.

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