Ken Goldberg and the relationship between Man and Robot
The ever popular BCNM professor Ken Goldberg has been featured again in an article. Ben Rosen, a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor featured Prof. Goldberg in "How a bionic glove could help factory workers come to Grips with robots." The article is mostly focused on the future of the automobile industry and the role of cooperation between industrial robots and humans - particularly the Robo-Glove an exoskeletal glove currently being developed by General Motors and BioServo Technologies.
From the article:
The glove represents one of a number of emerging technologies aimed at enhancing humans’ dexterity, endurance, and strength so they can work alongside industrial robots. In fact, “co-robots” — the term for this symbiotic pairing — constitute the newest trend in this line of research, Ken Goldberg, a University of California, Berkeley professor in engineering and the director of the university’s People and Robots Initiative, tells the Monitor Wednesday.
"We don’t want to put humans out of work. We want to make them more efficient, more reliable, and less prone to injuries," says Mr. Goldberg. "It’s about humans and robots working together."
But, in addition to the high price of industrial robots (up to $150,000 each), there are still technological limitations. For one, a robot has the “dexterity of a two-year-old child,” said Mr. Goldberg, in a forum Fortune magazine held in November 2015.
Robots, Goldberg explains to the Monitor, don’t adapt well to changing parts or conditions.
“That’s where a human helping guide a robot can be very valuable,” he says. “Workers have extremely fine-tuned perceptual skills.”
Read more the article and more from the Christian Science Monitor here.
Image credit to original Christian Science Monitor article.