SEATTLE — A robot with a sense of touch may one day “feel” pain,
both its own physical pain and empathy for the pain of its human companions. Such
touchy-feely robots are still far off, but advances in robotic touch-sensing are
bringing that possibility closer to reality.

Sensors embedded in soft, artificial
skin that can detect both a gentle touch and a painful thump have been hooked
up to a robot that can then signal emotions, Minoru Asada reported February 15 at
the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This
artificial “pain nervous system,” as Asada calls it, may be a small building
block for a machine that could ultimately experience pain (in a robotic sort of way). Such a feeling might  also allow a robot to “empathize” with a human
companion’s suffering.

Asada, an engineer at Osaka University
in Japan, and his colleagues have designed touch sensors that reliably pick up
a range of touches. In a robot system named Affetto, an unsettlingly realistic-looking child’s head, these touch and pain signals can be
converted to emotional facial expressions (SN:
7/2/19).

A touch-sensitive, soft material, as
opposed to a rigid metal surface, allows richer interactions between machine
and world, says neuroscientist Kingson Man of the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles. Artificial skin “allows the possibility of
engagement in versatile and truly intelligent ways.”

Such a system, Asada says,
might ultimately lead to robots that can recognize the pain of others, a
valuable skill for robots designed to help care for elderly people, for
instance.

But there is an important
distinction between a robot that responds in a predictable way to a painful
thump and a robot that’s capable of approximating an internal feeling, says
Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California.
In a recent article, he and Man argue that such an artificial sense of feeling might arise if robots were programmed to experience something
akin to a mental state such as pain (SN:
11/10/19). 

A robot with tactile sensors
that can detect touch and pain is “along the lines of having a robot, for
example, that smiles when you talk to it,” Damasio says. “It’s a device for
communication of the machine to a human.” While that’s an interesting
development, “it’s not the same thing” as a robot designed to compute some sort
of internal experience, he says.