Report: Robot Goes Nuts Due To “Imperfect Coding” – IOTW Report

Report: Robot Goes Nuts Due To “Imperfect Coding”

Tuesday, 6 May 2025, 8:00 MJA Uncategorized 25

Gulf Insider:
A Unitree Robotics H1 humanoid robot, developed and produced in Hangzhou, China, was seen exhibiting “erratic behavior” in a video circulating on X.

Footage circulating on X, shared by one user, alleged the incident was caused by “imperfect coding.”

“If you buy Chinese stuff, it might all end up like this… They might even deliberately make it this way to harm people...,” the X user said. more here

25 Comments on Report: Robot Goes Nuts Due To “Imperfect Coding”

  1. The code that checks motion and position against safety limits needs to the the first and most rigorously debugged and test. The extreme action seen in the clip should have caused an immediate shutdown.

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  3. Remember Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robots? Well it’s fictional. It would never, ever happen in the real world. That would be akin to taking guns away from good people because certainly no bad people would ever use them.
    Also, software is buggy.

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  9. …robots do what they are told to do, running programs that look at inputs and actuate outputs.

    If an input does not work correctly for any reason from a bad connection to infant failure to a dried water spot on a lens, it will act based on the erronious input.

    If the input is too far out of spec – which has to be defined by the programmer – then there needs to be failover coding to tell it what to do, usually some form of shutdown.

    If that coding doesnt exist it may keep attempting to complete a move to an input that doesnt exist until it hits a limit or is manually shut down.

    Outputs can fail too, as they are analog signals to servo drives that themselves can become inaccurate or corrupted.

    Lots of places things can go wrong, so lots of contingenies need to be programmed for. Failing to do this can cause loop behavior like this appears to be, where a robot tries to execute to a program point it cannot reach.

    Thats why I like my robots in cages with well-defined limited reach, lots of emergency stops, a ton of contingeny programming, and people trained to respect them. Even my Automated Guided Vehicles are only allowed to roam a particular virtual path, are festooned with emergency stops, and stop and call for help for any unprogrammed condition such as some idiot stuffed a towel in the rotating laser slot.

    All of this comes from a programmer, sometimes a team of programmers, so it r efects a human ability to anticipate and has human flaws baked in.

    I can look at a large program and tell where different people were involved. With engineers I know the way theu structure rungs can be like a signature. Its the same with letter logic, everyone bends cotter pins differently but they all get bent.

    Integrated systems used for I/O also often are collaboratively programmed. The rotating AGV lasers, for example, have to have their zones defined within the laser program, for which it makes one or more outputs, and selects zones based on one or more inputs. It is an autonomous subsystem that only “talks” discreretely with the main system, and was probably programmed by someone other than the guy who wrote the main code.

    And if someone quits/is fired/dies during programming, someone else comes in with their own methods and own programming biases, and has to figure out what the guy before him did, its usually too much to scrap on a deadline, so he tries to integrate with it, when he may or may not understand the original guy’s intentions.

    All of which assumes the guy had good intentions in the FIRST place. Not every disgruntled employee does.

    Nor does every People’s Republic worker preparing a robot for foreign export.

    And programs can simply become corrupt, in transmission, from power surges, lots of stuff can happen. Its reliable until it isnt.

    …all this only scratches the surface. The short version is that cheap, free-roaming humanoid robots should be considered as SaFe AnD eFfEcTiVe as COVID vaxxxines at this point in their development, and as such are prooooobaby not something you want around the kids.

    Or yourself.

    …and this doesnt even get into issues like obsolecence and little things like replacing some lasers every 10 years because that’s how long they last at an expense of thousands, OEMs ending support or simply going out of business, service techs that drink their lunch, etc., that people who do NOT have free-roaming robots in their house dont have to worry about.

    And all this because someone is too lazy to get their own beer and too much of an asshole to get a wife to get one for him.

    You want robots?

    No, you just THINK you want robots.

    If you GET robots, you will see the truth of it.

    The possibilities of robots are endless, true.

    Even M3gyn is possible.

    Enjoy.

    https://youtu.be/8eRD5leJxQY?si=ujUsV7E8eBH-lpu0

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  11. Use to work on GM assembly robots, and we had to lock them up in cages when we worked on them. They could lift 300lbs and moved at 25mph. I’ve seen them go nuts and never trusted them even when caged.

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  13. Lesson to be learned: “Chinaman” is regarded as a derogatory term by chinamen, and, apparently, their robots.

    That was usually the last word heard before Kwai Chang Caine went to work.

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  17. I’ve been around programmable servo driven stuff my entire life and I can tell you that’s no “Coding error”. They set range of motion (limit switches) and speed limits on every single servo driven mechanism I’ve ever seen. And the reason being is pretty evident if you watch that video. That robot was about to tear it self apart. And usually there’s a big ass E STOP button pretty close the the operator. I tend to agree with the guy that said this is intentional.

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