Robot pain: a speculative review of its functions

Given the scarce bibliography dealing explicitly with robot pain, this chapter has enriched its review with related research works about robot behaviours and capacities in which pain could play a role. It is shown that all such roles ¿ranging from punishment to intrinsic motivation and planning knowledge¿ can be formulated within the unified framework of reinforcement learning.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Assistive robotics: research challenges and ethics education initiatives

Assistive robotics is a fast growing field aimed at helping healthcarers in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and nursery homes, as well as empowering people with reduced mobility at home, so that they can autonomously fulfill their daily living activities. The need to function in dynamic human-centered environments poses new research challenges: robotic assistants need to have friendly interfaces, be highly adaptable and customizable, very compliant and intrinsically safe to people, as well as able to handle deformable materials. Besides technical challenges, assistive robotics raises also ethical defies, which have led to the emergence of a new discipline: Roboethics. Several institutions are developing regulations and standards, and many ethics education initiatives include contents on human-robot interaction and human dignity in assistive situations. In this paper, the state of the art in assistive robotics is briefly reviewed, and educational materials from a university course on Ethics in Social Robotics and AI focusing on the assistive context are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Robot manipulation in human environments: Challenges for learning algorithms

Resumen del trabajo presentado al Dagstuhl Seminar 2014 celebrado en Dagstuhl (Alemania) del 17 al 21 de febrero de 2014.The European projects PACO-PLUS, GARNICS and IntellAct, the Spanish projects PAU and PAU+, and the Catalan grant SGR-155.Peer Reviewe

Anticipatory science fiction to foster ethical debates on AI and robotics

The influence that hyperconnectivity and our increasing interaction with machines will have on the evolution of society and on people’s daily lives is difficult to predict. Thus, when trying to anticipate the potential benefits and risks of information technologies, not just lay people resort to science fiction (SF), but some scholars and even companies do so. Several universities, particularly in the US, include in their Computer Science and Engineering degrees a course on ethics and human values relative to technology. In this context of university education, my novel The Vestigial Heart (MIT Press, 2018) has been published together with online materials to teach a course on Ethics in Social Robotics and AI. Anticipatory literature has always taken science seriously and has tried to project its accomplishments into the future. It seems that science is also starting to take this literature seriously and find inspiration therein. This confluence could be extremely productive and is very good news, opening up interesting perspectives for the coming years.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Aprenentatge automàtic en xarxes i robots: reptes tecnocientífics i implicacions ètiques

Discurs de presentació de Carme Torras i Genís com a membre numerària de la Secció de Ciències i Tecnologia, llegit el dia 17 de desembre de 2018. Resum: Després de definir els conceptes d'adaptació i d'aprenentatge, es descriuen els mecanismes biològics que els implementen, a nivell cel·lular, sensoriomotor, cognitiu i d'espècie, per tot seguit descriure els tipus d'algorismes d'aprenentatge que s'hi han inspirat: no-supervisats, supervisats, i per reforçament. Alguns d'aquests algorismes permeten fer front als reptes tecnocientífics que planteja la robòtica social i la intel·ligència artificial: interfícies amigables, seguretat intrínseca, percepció i manipulació d'objectes deformables, execució orientada a objectius, capacitat de col·laboració amb les persones, i personalització. Finalment, s'exposen les implicacions socials i étiques d'aquestes noves tecnologies informàtiques i robòtiques d'interacció amb les persones, les normatives que s'estan desenvolupant i diverses iniciatives per a l'ensenyament de l'ètica en carreres tècniques i per a la divulgació entre la població general. Vídeo: https://youtu.be/b6SO7hnPhOUPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Science-fiction: a mirror for the future of humankind

Digital technologies have become part of our everyday lives and are increasingly acting as intermediaries in our workplaces and personal relationships or even substituting them. This poses a series of ethical questions that were not relevant for other types of machines and about which we have no previous experience, nor can we reliably predict how they will ultimately influence the evolution of humankind. This has led to the confluence of artificial intelligence (AI) with the humanities in an ethical debate that is starting to bear fruit, not only with the establishment of regulations and standards, but also with educational initiatives in university teaching, professional improvement, and the conformation of public opinion. Interestingly, science fiction (SF) often plays a prominent speculative role in highlighting the pros and cons of potential scenarios, thus favoring an engaging debate on AI and ethics.This work has been partly supported by the E uropean R esearch C ouncil (E R C ) under theE uropean U nion’s H orizon 2020 research and innovation programme through the projectC L O T H I L D E – C L O T H manI pulation L earning from D E monstrations (A dvanced G rantagreement N o 741930), and the S panish R esearch A gency through the M aría de M aeztu S eal ofE xcellence to I R I (M D M -2016-0656Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

From the Turing test to science fiction: the challenges of social robotics

The Turing test (1950) sought to distinguish whether a speaker engaged in a computer talk was a human or a machine [6]. Science fiction has immortalized several humanoid robots full of humanity, and it is nowadays speculating about the role the human being and the machine may play in this “pas à deux” in which we are irremissibly engaged [12]. Where is current robotics research heading to? Industrial robots are giving way to social robots designed to aid in healthcare, education, entertainment and services. In the near future, robots will assist disabled and elderly people, do chores, act as playmates for youngsters and adults, and even work as nannies and reinforcement teachers. This poses new requirements to robotics research, since social robots must be easy to program by non-experts [10], intrinsically safe [3], able to perceive and manipulate deformable objects [2, 8], tolerant to inaccurate perceptions and actions [4, 7] and, above all, they must be endowed with a strong learning capacity [1, 9] and a high adaptability [14] to non-predefined and dynamic environments. Taking as an example projects developed at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (CSIC-UPC), some of the scientific, technological and ethical challenges [5, 11, 13] that this robotic evolution entails will be showcased.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Adaptive modality selection algorithm in robot-assisted cognitive training

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Interaction of socially assistive robots with users is based on social cues coming from different interaction modalities, such as speech or gestures. However, using all modalities at all times may be inefficient as it can overload the user with redundant information and increase the task completion time. Additionally, users may favor certain modalities over the other as a result of their disability or personal preference. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Modality Selection (AMS) algorithm that chooses modalities depending on the state of the user and the environment, as well as user preferences. The variables that describe the environment and the user state are defined as resources, and we posit that modalities are successful if certain resources possess specific values during their use. Besides the resources, the proposed algorithm takes into account user preferences which it learns while interacting with users. We tested our algorithm in simulations, and we implemented it on a robotic system that provides cognitive training, specifically Sequential memory exercises. Experimental results show that it is possible to use only a subset of available modalities without compromising the interaction. Moreover, we see a trend for users to perform better when interacting with a system with implemented AMS algorithm.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Recognizing point clouds using conditional random fields

Detecting objects in cluttered scenes is a necessary step for many robotic tasks and facilitates the interaction of the robot with its environment. Because of the availability of efficient 3D sensing devices as the Kinect, methods for the recognition of objects in 3D point clouds have gained importance during the last years. In this paper, we propose a new supervised learning approach for the recognition of objects from 3D point clouds using Conditional Random Fields, a type of discriminative, undirected probabilistic graphical model. The various features and contextual relations of the objects are described by the potential functions in the graph. Our method allows for learning and inference from unorganized point clouds of arbitrary sizes and shows significant benefit in terms of computational speed during prediction when compared to a state-of-the-art approach based on constrained optimization.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft