Collaborative robots (“cobots”), especially when they are driven by AI (and soon, perhaps, quantum computers), are a frontier technology for industry settings all over the world. Already widely adopted across East Asia and the US, they are gaining ground in Europe, too.
This article draws on the safety and liability landscape for robotics and AI under EU law to provide the first regulatory proposal on how to encode safety standards into smart cobots. This results from months of interdisciplinary work at the Made Smarter Innovation: Smart Cobotics Centre, plus several weeks of perusal of Politecnico di Milano resources and insights from dozens of colleagues in law, engineering, ergonomics, neuropsychiatry, supply-chain management, and social policy.
The full paper can be accessed here.