YOU step into the waiting room on your way to an important meeting. The receptionist, a smiling humanoid robot, shows you to a chair and offers you a drink. When you accept, the robot returns bearing a cup of steaming hot coffee. Just as the robot passes you the drink, its arm jerks, spilling the scalding liquid all over you.
The growing breed of oh-so-cute robotic pets and small humanoids can make it easy to forget that robots are essentially fast-moving lumps of metal, and therefore potentially dangerous when something goes wrong. Industrial robots have been with us for decades,…
