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Our friends electric 我们的机器人朋友 Robotics: A new breed of robots is being designed to collaborate with humans, working alongside them to make them more productive 机器人技术：协作机器人被设计为能与人类共同工作的新型机器人，他们能让人类的工作更有效率。 AS GIANT welding robots go about their business in a modern car factory, the scene looks like a cyberpunk vision of Dante’s “Inferno”. Amid showers of sparks, articulated mechanical arms nearly the size of telephone poles move sections of partially built vehicles so “scarily fast” that anyone who accidentally ends up in the wrong place is as good as dead, says Rodney Brooks, the boss of Rethink Robotics, a robot-maker based in Boston. For this reason, industrial robots operate in cages or behind security fences. But by segregating robots from humans, such safety measures greatly limit the tasks that robots can perform. In car factories, for example, most of the final assembly is done, expensively, by hand. 在一家现代化的汽车制造工厂，几个大型焊接机器人正在有条不紊地焊接着汽车部件——这样的情景简直就是电子版的但丁“地狱”。Rethink Robotics）的老板，他表示如果人类员工在这样的机器人加工车间站错位置，很容易发生人身事故。正因如此，工业机器人被安全围栏或铁笼圈起来，让它们在限定的工作范围内工作。将机器人和人类员工相互隔离的做法的确能降低生产事故的发生率，但也限制了机器人性能的发挥，例如，在一个汽车制造工厂，很多汽车装备工序都是由人类员工手工完成的，这样的装配方式成本很高。 Neither workers nor robots can reach their productive potential without interacting more closely, says Volker Grünenwald, head of systems integration at Pilz, a German engineering firm. Eager to design machines that can be used for a wider range of tasks, technologists are now figuring out how to bring robots “out of the cage” so that they can work safely and more productively with people. The aim is to combine the dexterity, flexibility and problem-solving skills of humans with the strength, endurance and precision of robots. The emergence of “co-operative” or “collaborative” robots, as these new machines are called, could also lead to robots that are better able to help out in the office, at school or in the home. 沃克·格茹愣威尔德是德国彼尔茨工程公司（Pilz）系统综合开发部的主管，他对此情况评论道：如果人类和机器人没有紧密的互动，二者的生产潜力都无法全部发挥出来。出于设计一种用途广泛的机器人的目的，