NPR: "When Robots Can Kill, It's Unclear Who Will Be To Blame" by Steve Henn March 21, 20145:00 AM The fast-advancing field of robotics is opening up serious questions about the military-based motivations behind some of the coolest tricks our machines can now be programmed to perform. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, helped create the Internet. But these days, DARPA is probably best known for its robotics contests. Its latest robotics challenge was inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which happened three years ago. Back then, nuclear engineers rushed to shut down reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, but fear of radiation poisoning kept utility workers at the plant from shutting off the effectively cooling reactors sooner. Eventually, three of the plant's six reactors melted down. "There is good evidence that if we had been able to send in some kind of robot and had that robot do relatively simple things, simple manual tasks like opening valves, opening doors, getting to control panels, a lot of the following disaster could have been averted, " says Brian Gerkey, of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. [...] Continua qui: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/03/21/291887341/when-robots-...