Towards Safe and Trustworthy Social Robots : Ethical Challenges and Practical Issues

Maha Salem, Gabriella Lakatos, Farshid Amirabdollahian, K. Dautenhahn, ‘Towards Safe and Trustworthy Social Robots: Ethical Challenges and Practical Issues’, paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Social Robotics, Paris, France, 26-30 October, 2015.As robots are increasingly developed to assist humans so- cially with everyday tasks in home and healthcare settings, questions regarding the robot's safety and trustworthiness need to be addressed. The present work investigates the practical and ethical challenges in de- signing and evaluating social robots that aim to be perceived as safe and can win their human users' trust. With particular focus on collaborative scenarios in which humans are required to accept information provided by the robot and follow its suggestions, trust plays a crucial role and is strongly linked to persuasiveness. Accordingly, human-robot trust can directly aect people's willingness to cooperate with the robot, while under- or overreliance may have severe or even dangerous consequences. Problematically, investigating trust and human perceptions of safety in HRI experiments proves challenging in light of numerous ethical con- cerns and risks, which this paper aims to highlight and discuss based on experiences from HRI practice.Peer reviewe

Evaluating Trust and Safety in HRI : Practical Issues and Ethical Challenges

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Date of Acceptance: 11/02/2015In an effort to increase the acceptance and persuasiveness of socially assistive robots in home and healthcare environments, HRI researchers attempt to identify factors that promote human trust and perceived safety with regard to robots. Especially in collaborative contexts in which humans are requested to accept information provided by the robot and follow its suggestions, trust plays a crucial role, as it is strongly linked to persuasiveness. As a result, human- robot trust can directly affect people's willingness to cooperate with the robot, while under- or overreliance could have severe or even dangerous consequences. Problematically, investigating trust and human perceptions of safety in HRI experiments is not a straightforward task and, in light of a number of ethical concerns and risks, proves quite challenging. This position statement highlights a few of these points based on experiences from HRI practice and raises a few important questions that HRI researchers should consider.Final Accepted Versio

Mixed Initiative Systems for Human-Swarm Interaction: Opportunities and Challenges

Human-swarm interaction (HSI) involves a number of human factors impacting human behaviour throughout the interaction. As the technologies used within HSI advance, it is more tempting to increase the level of swarm autonomy within the interaction to reduce the workload on humans. Yet, the prospective negative effects of high levels of autonomy on human situational awareness can hinder this process. Flexible autonomy aims at trading-off these effects by changing the level of autonomy within the interaction when required; with mixed-initiatives combining human preferences and automation's recommendations to select an appropriate level of autonomy at a certain point of time. However, the effective implementation of mixed-initiative systems raises fundamental questions on how to combine human preferences and automation recommendations, how to realise the selected level of autonomy, and what the future impacts on the cognitive states of a human are. We explore open challenges that hamper the process of developing effective flexible autonomy. We then highlight the potential benefits of using system modelling techniques in HSI by illustrating how they provide HSI designers with an opportunity to evaluate different strategies for assessing the state of the mission and for adapting the level of autonomy within the interaction to maximise mission success metrics.Comment: Author version, accepted at the 2018 IEEE Annual Systems Modelling Conference, Canberra, Australi

On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces

© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the user’s acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree – to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving users’ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

The perception of emotion in artificial agents

Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges and guiding principles to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents

Enactivism and Robotic Language Acquisition: A Report from the Frontier

In this article, I assess an existing language acquisition architecture, which was deployed in linguistically unconstrained human–robot interaction, together with experimental design decisions with regard to their enactivist credentials. Despite initial scepticism with respect to enactivism’s applicability to the social domain, the introduction of the notion of participatory sense-making in the more recent enactive literature extends the framework’s reach to encompass this domain. With some exceptions, both our architecture and form of experimentation appear to be largely compatible with enactivist tenets. I analyse the architecture and design decisions along the five enactivist core themes of autonomy, embodiment, emergence, sense-making, and experience, and discuss the role of affect due to its central role within our acquisition experiments. In conclusion, I join some enactivists in demanding that interaction is taken seriously as an irreducible and independent subject of scientific investigation, and go further by hypothesising its potential value to machine learning.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Robots and Privacy in Japanese, Thai and Chinese Cultures. \ud Discussions on Robots and Privacy as Topics of Intercultural Information Ethics in ‘Far East’

In this paper, I will analyze ‘cultural meanings and values’ associated with some of the important IIE(intercultural information ethics) topics in ‘Far East, ’i.e. ‘human and robot interaction(HRI)’ and ‘privacy.’ By focusing on these relatively newly emerging topics in ‘Far East,’ I will attempt to make the cultural Ba (locus/place where different\ud meanings of things, events, people’s experiences come together; or frameworks for understanding meanings of phenomena and events) visible through analysis of research data done in Japan, Thailand and China in the past several years. The research data shown in this paper suggest that we can’t understand people’s attitudes toward robots and privacy in ‘Far East’ without taking into consideration people’s broader views on ‘what is a good life?’ and ‘what is a virtuous life?