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At We Robot 2013 Diana Cooper, a JD Candidate at the University of Ottawa, presented her attempt to tackle the open source headache by proposing a new license called the Ethical Robot License (ERL). In her paper, A Licensing Approach to Regulation of Open Robotics, Cooper presents ERL as “a licensing approach to allocate liability between manufacturers and users and promote ethical and non-harmful use of open robots”.
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Robots in the Wild »
Video interviews from Robot Block Party 2013
Last week, Robot Block Party 2013 took place right after We Robot conference.
Of course, I had an extra day to spend at Stanford University after the conference and couldn’t miss out on the event.
The fun really began when I got there. I was greeted by a gigantic inflatable Keepon, followed by booth after booth of robots. Among them were Puzzlebox, a robot controlled using EEG, PR2 from Willow Garage, and a self-driving car demonstrating LIDAR technology from Velodyne. With a lot of help from Dr. Peter Asaro, an expert in roboethics and professor at The New School, and my labmate Mr. Ergun Calisgan from the CARIS lab (University of British Columbia) I captured some of the highlights from Robot Block Party on video.
Puzzlebox:
Puzzlebox Orbit is a helicopter controlled using EEG signals. It was programmed to launch the helicopter whenever the user’s attention level goes above a threshold. As you’ll see in the video, my attention level proved to be quite intense for the Puzzlebox Orbit whenever I listen to someone speak.
Willow Garage:
Willow Garage‘s PR2 is one of the more sophisticated robots in the world today. In this video, Kaijen Hsiao talks about the robot and Willow Garage’s teach by demonstration studies.
Velodyne:
LIDAR is a remote sensing technology that is key to autonomous driving. I had the opportunity to speak with Velodyne‘s president Marta Hall, who discusses Velodyne’s technology and self-driving cars.
New Book: “Robot Futures” by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh
Robot Futures is a new book written by Dr. Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been teaching roboethics at the university for many years. According to Dr. Noel Sharkey, this book is “[a]n exhilarating dash into the future of robotics from a scholar with the enthusiasm of a bag of monkeys. It is gripping from the start with little sci-fi stories in each chapter punching home points backed up forcefully by factual reality. This is an entertaining tour de force that will appeal to anyone with an interest in robots.”
Self-awareness, Robot Rights, and Today’s Robots
Last Friday, I was sitting in a seminar room reading up on an article that introduced me to a group called the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots (ASPCR). The message of the group and its position is very clear from the website. The front page of the website reads in large letters “Robots are people too! Or at least they will be someday” and “Upholding Robotic Rights Since 1999″.
I am very much open to such discussion of robot rights if and when such machines are developed. I think advocating for robot rights would become necessary if robots are sentient beings that are equal to humans.
However, if and before we are to get to that point, maybe we should be asking ‘why’ we would want such a machine in the first place?
In search for more HRI/Roboethics — start of CITEC Summer School
I woke up Saturday morning with less sense of panic than I had expected.
I was scheduled to leave for Europe later that day, and I still had barely packed for my three-week trip. It’s not …
Can robots know the difference between right and wrong?
Whenever I introduce people to roboethics, people can’t help but ask me “Is robotics technology really advanced enough for us to even worry about ethical issues surrounding them?”.
I think this BBC report (forwarded to me via my labmate Tom Huryn) does a great job of connecting what’s out there already, and how roboethics is indeed a relevant topic of discussion today (rather than something sci-fi-esque for a distant future).
Geminoid Summit
According to IEEE Spectrum’s automation blog, three geminoids met in Japan at the ATR laboratory on March 30th. What are geminoids? They are telepresence robots that take the form of an android (human looking robot).
You can …
Roboethics 2010 Timeline
It’s mid-February 2011 already, and the year 2010 is well tucked away in the past.
But February is not too late for a post on 2010, I think.
I worked on this timeline of roboethics events 2010 …
Is robotics (and robotic surgery) just a big hype?
Is robotics all just a big hype? I would like to say yes, and no. This is a temporary recycle of an older post I wrote last December covering a topic I wanted to discuss at last night’s Cafe Scientifique. How is medical robotics affecting the society? A discussion of cost vs. benefits, how more people are choosing robotic surgeries, and how some are more disappointed afterwards.
the Andersons and the Ethical Robot
For those of you who don’t know the Andersons in the roboethics world, please meet them via the video here.
Susan Anderson and Michael Anderson are a philosopher and a computer scientist (yes, they’re a couple) …
Small Steps for Robots to Giant Leap for Robotkind?
I found a very good coverage on robots and issues involved with the current state of the art technology.
PBS NewsHour’s correspondent Miles O’Brien reports:
The full transcript of the coverage is available here.
Man vs. Machine – A Bowling Match…
We, the homo-sapiens, constantly seek challenges and wow the world. Yuna Kim’s perfect figure skating performance at the Vancouver Winter Olympics (2010) would be my favorite example of this, but then again, we met the challenge of …
The Author
AJung (@RoboEthics)
Writes about anything & everything Roboethics. Ph.D. student studying Human-Robot Interaction and Roboethics. Mechatronics engineer with a sprinkle of Philosophy background.
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