alt Hacker NewsI'm always wondering at the safety measures on these things. How much force is in those motors?
This is basically safety-critical stuff but with LLMs. Hallucinating wrong answers in text is bad, hallucinating that your chest is a drawer to pull open is very bad.
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That's actually more of a solved problem. Robot arms that can track the force they're applying and where to avoid injuring humans have been kicking around for 10-15 years. It let them go out of the mega safety cells into the same space as people and even do things like letting the operator pose the robot to teach it positions instead of having to do it in a computer program or with a remote control.
The term I see a lot is co-robotics or corobots. At least that's what Kuka calls them.
You can have dedicated controllers for the motors that limit their max torque.
The thing in the video moves slower than the sloth in Zootopia. If you die by that robot, you probably deserve it.
In terms of low-level safety, they can probably back out forces on the robot from current or torque measurement and detect collisions. The challenge comes with faster motions carrying lots of inertia and behavioral safety (e.g. don't pour oil on the stove)