HUMANOID ROBOTICS n humanoid needs a reserve of power simply to lower itself to a stable position. Stability depends on nothing going wrong which makes fault tolerance the deeper safety challenge for human-shaped robots. Where this meets the rule book Industrial robots are typically designed to be single-fault tolerant to meet the relevant safety standards. In plain terms, no single component failure should be able to create a dangerous situation. ISO 10218-1, the standard for industrial robot arms, is built on that principle. Apply the same requirement to a heavy, dynamically stable machine and you are left with two options. The first is to engineer actuators, sensors and battery management that are either fully redundant or so reliable they almost never fail – how to do that at an acceptable cost currently eludes me. The second option is to accept that working alongside a humanoid carries more risk than working alongside a conventional industrial robot, because a single failure can lead to a hazard. ISO 10218-1 does not address the risks created by a humanoid’s own mobility. The first standard written specifically for dynamically stable mobile robots, ISO/CD 25785-1, is still at committee-draft stage, working through its first round of comments. As a first attempt at hard new ground, it has a long way to mature. None of this means humanoids are impossible. It simply means the safety case for them is unfinished, and the honest version of that case is more demanding than the current conversation suggests. The advantage of being purpose-built A mobile collaborative robot – a robotic arm mounted on a wheeled autonomous base – does not face these problems because it is statically stable – a heavy base, a low centre of gravity, and no need to balance. When something goes wrong, the safe response is simple, and crucially it is simple to make redundant. Cut the power and apply the brakes. A machine standing still is rarely a danger to anyone. That difference is the result of choosing a form factor for the task rather than for its resemblance to us. Autonomous mobile robots, collaborative arms, and the standardsdriven safety functions behind them, were designed so that the failure modes are predictable and the safe states are easy to reach. The robot’s safety does not hinge on a perception system continuing to work. It is built into the architecture before any software runs. There is another reason that purpose-built automation will keep winning on the factory floor. The complexity that makes a humanoid captivating in a demonstration, is the same complexity that multiplies its failure modes. In manufacturing, reliability is nonnegotiable, and falling short means downtime, rework and risk. Humanoids are not the only way to harness the incredible potential of physical AI on the factory floor. A rapidly growing number of AIenabled applications are running on collaborative industrial robots and autonomous mobile robots handling machine tending, palletising, inspection and material movement with the safety and reliability that the factory floor demands. The question to ask first I welcome Nvidia’s move, and I hope it marks the start of a more serious, better-resourced era for robot safety. The more rigour the industry brings, the better for every company that is building machines that share space with people – mine included. But anyone evaluating a humanoid for real work should start with the important, but unglamorous, question. Before asking whether the robot can recognise a worker, we need to ask what it does when an actuator, a sensor or a battery fails mid-task. Ask for the stability and reliability data. Ask which standards the system is certified against, and which parts of its operation those standards actually cover. We have had this debate, rightly, about selfdriving cars – an open and public discussion about how much risk is acceptable and who decides. Humanoids deserve the same scrutiny. Until the field can answer the failure question as confidently as it answers the perception question, the proven path remains the one the industry has been building for years: robots whose shape, and whose safety, are designed for the job. n Is a collaborative robot mounted on a mobile platform a safer alternative to a humanoid robot?
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