SOMEWHERE in a laboratory in central Europe, six men are getting beaten up by a robot.

Our utopian future existence wasn't supposed to be like this.

At least, not according to Isaac Asimov's First Law of Robotics, which states that: "A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

Yet New Scientist is reporting that a "powerful robot" has been tasked with "hitting people over and over again in a bid to induce anything from mild to unbearable pain".

Of course, there's good intent behind the mechanised violence and it actually has everything to do with meeting Asimov's rules for robot protocol.

By teaching a robot where the human threshold for pain is, we can teach the robot when to stop punching.

Or to not punch at all, preferably.

Professor Borut Povse was the genius who came up with the experiment, got ethical approval to carry it out, and, most impressively, coaxed six of his colleagues into taking the increasingly powerful blows.

Prof Povse sees the day when humans work comfortably side by side with robots, and felt that it was important to find a way to teach machines to have some form of empathy for their fleshy colleagues.

"Future robots will not work behind safety guards with locked doors or light barriers," he wrote in an early paper on the topic with the title Cooperation of human operator and small industrial robot.

"Instead they will be working in close cooperation with humans which leads to fundamental concern of how to ensure safe physical human robot interaction.

"Despite all the precautions undertaken the collision between robot and man can occur."

They started occurring in Proc Povse's laboratory well before masochistic humans got involved.

To clear the way for using real-life subjects, Prof Povse first had to prove his experiments were worthy.

His early paper details research using a rubber arm covered in sensors which took increasingly powerful blows from a robot "fist", although robot "painfully pointed spike" might be more apt.

Not surprisingly, Prof Povse was able to drive the punchy robot to the point where it delivered significant tissue damage.

Hence the need to get real men involved, just to make sure flesh is at least equally susceptible to damage inflicted by a mechanically driven spike as rubber is.

In his report on the rubber arm abuse, Prof Povse says he used a pointy fist because "it appears to be most dangerous in human-robot interactions".

In the real world experiment, the men get to cry mercy, upon which the robot promises to stop.

But the key word here is "men", which means the pride associated with taking the blows gives this type of scientific experiment the potential to become a spectator sport.