The humanoid safety paradox: introducing JUST HIVE
AI GeneratedWe have seen something in our own work that worries us: the more normal we make a humanoid behave, the more people expect it to behave normally. They walk closer. They turn their back to it. They trust it like they would trust a colleague.
But a humanoid is still a robot. It is a computer on two legs, and computers go wrong. A sensor glitches, the software freezes, a joint does something nobody planned. When that happens next to a person who has stopped paying attention, it can be dangerous.
An industrial robot with a strange shape stands behind a fence, and people keep their distance. A robot that looks and moves like us makes them relax. That is the paradox: the better humanoids get, the more serious safety has to become.
So we are introducing JUST HIVE, our new safety system. We have borrowed the best from aviation.
Borrowed from aviation
Aviation is the safest way to travel. It did not get there with better pilots. It got there by making it safe to admit mistakes.
In the 1990s the industry adopted what it calls a just culture. A pilot or mechanic who reports a near-miss is protected, by law in the EU since 2014. The report goes into a system. The system gets fixed. The next crew does not repeat the error. The only thing that gets punished is deliberately breaking a rule or hiding what happened.
Two legs
JUST HIVE stands on two legs (like a humanoid robot).
The robot
We build our own safety system from the bottom up, so we control and log everything the robot does and can meet EU regulations. The system is robot agnostic, so it works across the humanoids we deploy, not just one brand. Every guard trip, every rejected command and every e-stop press is recorded in our logging and safety system automatically.
Read about Heimdall, our robot platformThe people
Near-misses, falls and unclear procedures are reported the same day, and nobody is punished for an honest error. We are open about what goes wrong, internally and with our customers. Every week the CEO and the JUST HIVE team go through the reports and decide what we fix first.
Our robots do not work perfect yet. This is how they get better, and how nobody gets hurt while they do.
If you want to know more, visit hiverobots.dk/safety or contact Jakob Sand, JUST HIVE safety manager at HIVE.
JUST HIVE - Safety