For safety reasons, Agility’s Digit robots have been deployed inside “work cells” separate from human workers. But within the next 12 months, Agility plans to commercially launch its Digit v5 robot as the “first AI-enabled, cooperatively safe humanoid robot,” Hurst said.
Both Agility and Boston Dynamics joined a working group to develop an international safety standard for industrial mobile robots through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The draft version of the standard, ISO 25785-1, is currently being considered by a technical committee that oversees robotics. Once the committee signs off, the draft international standard will be put to a vote by the 89 voting nations of the ISO.
Some robots that already work very closely with human bodies have limited autonomy for safety reasons. “Surgical robots don’t perform surgery automatically with full autonomy,” said Bhushan Patel, principal technical program manager and an engineering leader at Intuitive, a surgical robotics company based in Sunnyvale, California, in an interview with Ars. Instead, he described such robotic devices as “still overwhelmingly human-driven systems with varying levels of intelligent assistance.”
The final frontier: Human bodies
The first robotic telesurgery concepts in the 1980s were intended to help astronauts in space, Bhushan wrote in an article for IEEE Transmitter. But the idea soon led to robotic surgery procedures for patients on Earth, such as robotic-assisted radical prostatectomy, which involves human surgeons controlling robot arms to remove part or all of the prostate gland.
Such surgical robots equipped with tiny tools allow surgeons to do minimally invasive operations with superhuman precision in the confined spaces of the human body, like performing extremely delicate repairs on blood vessels or making precise incisions while avoiding collateral damage to neighboring nerve bundles.
From the late 1980s through the early 2000s, human surgeons still did everything from planning to executing surgeries while controlling the robotic tools. That only began to change as robotic systems gained level one autonomy by providing assistive capabilities such as automatically stabilizing motions to allow for more precise actions by human surgeons controlling robotic tools, enforcing safe movement boundaries to avoid hurting patients or staff, and providing AI-powered computer vision to help surgeons visually differentiate between different anatomical structures inside the body.
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