SEATTLE - A robot with a sense of touch may one day "feel" pain. Touchy-feely robots are still far off, but advances in robotic touch-sensing bring that possibility closer to reality. Sensors embedded in soft, artificial skin that can detect both a gentle touch and a "painful" thump were hooked up to a robot that can then signal emotions, engineer Minoru Asada reported at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting on February 15. This artificial "pain nervous system," as Asada calls it, maybe a small building block for a machine that could experience pain, in a robotic sort of way.
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