17,871 research outputs found
An Intervening Ethical Governor for a Robot Mediator in Patient-Caregiver Relationships
© Springer International Publishing AG 2015DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-46667-5_6Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) experience challenges when interacting with
caregivers due to their declining control over their musculature. To remedy those challenges, a
robot mediator can be used to assist in the relationship between PD patients and their caregivers.
In this context, a variety of ethical issues can arise. To overcome one issue in particular,
providing therapeutic robots with a robot architecture that can ensure patients’ and caregivers’
dignity is of potential value. In this paper, we describe an intervening ethical governor for a
robot that enables it to ethically intervene, both to maintain effective patient–caregiver
relationships and prevent the loss of dignity
An architecture for ethical robots inspired by the simulation theory of cognition
The expanding ability of robots to take unsupervised decisions renders it imperative that mechanisms are in place to guarantee the safety of their behaviour. Moreover, intelligent autonomous robots should be more than safe; arguably they should also be explicitly ethical. In this paper, we put forward a method for implementing ethical behaviour in robots inspired by the simulation theory of cognition. In contrast to existing frameworks for robot ethics, our approach does not rely on the verification of logic statements. Rather, it utilises internal simulations which allow the robot to simulate actions and predict their consequences. Therefore, our method is a form of robotic imagery. To demonstrate the proposed architecture, we implement a version of this architecture on a humanoid NAO robot so that it behaves according to Asimov's laws of robotics. In a series of four experiments, using a second NAO robot as a proxy for the human, we demonstrate that the Ethical Layer enables the robot to prevent the human from coming to harm in simple test scenarios
Towards Verifiably Ethical Robot Behaviour
Ensuring that autonomous systems work ethically is both complex and
difficult. However, the idea of having an additional `governor' that assesses
options the system has, and prunes them to select the most ethical choices is
well understood. Recent work has produced such a governor consisting of a
`consequence engine' that assesses the likely future outcomes of actions then
applies a Safety/Ethical logic to select actions. Although this is appealing,
it is impossible to be certain that the most ethical options are actually
taken. In this paper we extend and apply a well-known agent verification
approach to our consequence engine, allowing us to verify the correctness of
its ethical decision-making.Comment: Presented at the 1st International Workshop on AI and Ethics, Sunday
25th January 2015, Hill Country A, Hyatt Regency Austin. Will appear in the
workshop proceedings published by AAA
Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph
Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and
challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more
sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides
constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if
implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous
weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval
operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of
developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that
address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that
is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many
instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these
often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with
the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The
Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of
Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that
required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of
the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade
RoboChain: A Secure Data-Sharing Framework for Human-Robot Interaction
Robots have potential to revolutionize the way we interact with the world
around us. One of their largest potentials is in the domain of mobile health
where they can be used to facilitate clinical interventions. However, to
accomplish this, robots need to have access to our private data in order to
learn from these data and improve their interaction capabilities. Furthermore,
to enhance this learning process, the knowledge sharing among multiple robot
units is the natural step forward. However, to date, there is no
well-established framework which allows for such data sharing while preserving
the privacy of the users (e.g., the hospital patients). To this end, we
introduce RoboChain - the first learning framework for secure, decentralized
and computationally efficient data and model sharing among multiple robot units
installed at multiple sites (e.g., hospitals). RoboChain builds upon and
combines the latest advances in open data access and blockchain technologies,
as well as machine learning. We illustrate this framework using the example of
a clinical intervention conducted in a private network of hospitals.
Specifically, we lay down the system architecture that allows multiple robot
units, conducting the interventions at different hospitals, to perform
efficient learning without compromising the data privacy.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
Multi-bot Easy Control Hierarchy
The goal of our project is to create a software architecture that makes it possible to easily control a multi-robot system, as well as seamlessly change control modes during operation. The different control schemes first include the ability to implement on-board and off-board controllers. Second, the commands can specify either actuator level, vehicle level, or fleet level behavior. Finally, motion can be specified by giving a waypoint and time constraint, a velocity and heading, or a throttle and angle. Our code is abstracted so that any type of robot - ranging from ones that use a differential drive set up, to three-wheeled holonomic platforms, to quadcopters - can be added to the system by simply writing drivers that interface with the hardware used and by implementing math packages that do the required calculations. Our team has successfully demonstrated piloting a single robots while switching between waypoint navigation and a joystick controller. In addition, we have demonstrated the synchronized control of two robots using joystick control. Future work includes implementing a more robust cluster control, including off-board functionality, and incorporating our architecture into different types of robots
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