A chess robot broke the finger of a seven-year-old boy during a tournament in Russia, according to the newspaper The Guardian British.
The accident occurred last week at the Moscow Open Chess Championship, where organizers contracted the robot to play with competitors.
A video shows that the robot is an artificial robotic arm, dedicated to moving pieces on three chess boards simultaneously.
The head of the Moscow Chess Federation, Sergey Lazarev, said: Russian news agency“The robot broke a child’s finger. That, of course, is a bad thing.”
“We rented the robot, and it was shown in many places, for a long time, with specialists. Apparently the operators ignored it. The child made a movement, and then we need to give the robot time to respond, but the boy hurried and the robot caught him. We have no relationship,” Lazarev explained. with Android”.
It is not clear what explanation the robot creators gave for this incident, but such incidents are a result of the robot’s engineers failing to adjust the safety protocol while interacting with humans.
In industrial environments, robots move along specific paths at specific times, and often lack sensors to recognize or respond to nearby humans.
This means that if a person gets in the way of a robot, they will not know it is there.
This type of robot blindness has caused many deaths. The US Department of Labor records about one death per year.
In the case of the chess robot, the device appears to be designed only to recognize and move chess pieces, not to respond to the appearance of a human hand in the playing area.