Chess robot breaks seven-year-old finger during a tournament in Russia: According to accounts from local news agencies in Russia, a little child who was participating in a chess tournament was injured when his finger was broken by a chess robot (seen via The Guardian).
At the Moscow Chess Open, which took place a week ago, the incident occurred when a robot was recruited to compete against human players. The equipment is seen in the video of the incident (which can be seen below) to be a conventional industrial robot arm that has been modified to move pieces on three chess boards at the same time.
“The child’s finger was shattered by the robot. According to Sergey Lazarev, President of the Moscow Chess Federation, who spoke with the Russian news agency TASS, “This, of course, is horrible” (translation via Google Translate).
Lazarev is quoted as saying, “We rented the robot, and it has been presented in a lot of different places, for a very long time, with specialists.” It would appear that the operators failed to notice it. After the youngster made a move, we need to allow time for the robot to respond; nevertheless, the boy hastened, and the robot grabbed him. There is absolutely no connection between us and the robot.
It is not quite clear what explanation if any, the developers of the robot have provided for this mishap; but, events of this nature are very uncommon in settings where robot engineers have failed to adequately consider safety precautions when working with humans.
Robots function as virtually blind operators in the vast majority of manufacturing settings. They move in predetermined patterns at predetermined times and frequently lack the sensors necessary to notice or react to the presence of humans in the area. In other words, if you step into their path, they won’t notice you’re there even though you’re standing right in front of them.
A great number of robots have been destroyed as a result of incidents of this kind of blind collision. It is generally agreed that the first accident of this kind occurred in 1979, at a Ford factory when an employee named Robert Williams was killed when he was crushed by a robot arm. The United States Department of Labor keeps track of these deaths, which amount to around one fatality per year; however, the statistics can be varied since different businesses have different ideas on what constitutes a robot. Is a conveyer belt, for instance, an example of a robot? Or a machine that molds things?
It would appear that the sole purpose of the device used by the chess robot was to recognize and move the chess pieces; it was not programmed to react to the presence of a human hand in the playing area.
It would appear that the child broke one or more of the safety guidelines that were in place. According to The Guardian, Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation, told a Telegram-based news channel called Baza that the player “did not comprehend when he made his move that he first had to wait.”
However, it is more true to argue that the designers of the robot broke safety laws by developing a machine that could accidentally hurt humans. This is because they created a mechanism that could accidentally hurt humans. It would have been possible to avoid the accident by incorporating a few simple safety precautions, such as installing a camera above the chess board that stops the robot from moving if it detects any unfamiliar objects in its field of view or putting a cap on the amount of force that the robot’s arm is capable of producing.
According to Lazarev, even if the video footage of the occurrence is upsetting, the youngster quickly recovered to the point where they were able to continue playing. According to what Lazarev told TASS, “the child played the very next day, completing the tournament in a cast, and the volunteers helped to record the moves.” “It seems that the people who operate the robots will have to give some thought to ways in which they can increase protection in order to ensure that this does not occur again.”
