Robotics: Robots are (still) inferior to humans

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“For example, there is a robot called Cheetah that can run faster than humans. But there is a high energy consumption and when it comes to sprinting people are still faster,” Robert Riener from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Zurich told the Keystone-SDA news agency.

Riener, along with two other researchers, looked for the best robots and compared them to humans. The result was published Tuesday in the journal “Frontiers in Robotics and AI.” The researchers focused on so-called humanoid robots. Robots were compared based on functions, such as locomotion, and their underlying structures, such as muscles or motors.

For Riener, the surprising thing about the results of the comparison was not that robots were no match for humans. “I was surprised that individual technical components were already better than humans,” Riener said. This is how cameras triumph over eyes, microphones over ears, and motors over muscles. “It seems like we haven’t yet managed to combine these components in a way that makes a robot work better than humans in terms of movement and perception functions,” says Riener.

According to Riener’s assessment, the inferiority of robots will not last long. “Two years ago I thought it would take forever for robots to outperform humans,” Riener said. But now I believe we will be ready in the near future.”

According to Riener, this is a huge opportunity. “Non-value and sometimes dangerous jobs in industry can be taken over by robots, and robots can support staff in maintenance,” Riener said. As long as robots are used correctly, the researcher does not see them as a threat. (SDA)

Source : Blick