Technology and the Appearance of the Good: Carebots, Virtual Virtue, and the Best Possible Life

Growth of the elderly population and nursing shortage place increased pressure on our health care systems. One possible response is to let care robots or carebots take over care tasks. Some of these robots appear human in some way (humanoid robots), or look and act like a pet (pet robots). As personal robots they ‘share physical and emotional spaces with the user’ (Cerqui and Arras 2001) and play a role in daily life. They can assist ill and elderly people by monitoring them, by delivering drugs, by moving them around, by helping them with domestic tasks. They can be used for therapeutic aims, or to entertain and accompany people. \ud How can we evaluate such a near-future scenario in terms of its contribution to ‘the good life’, given that carebots would often replace real humans or pets?\u

Enhancing Practice and Achievement in Introductory Programming With a Robot Olympics

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It’s Not the Robot’s Fault! Russian and American Perspectives on Responsibility for Robot Harms

As automated vehicles, personal robots, and other cyberphysical systems enter our world, law must confront important questions about civil liability for harms caused by these systems. Two legal scholars—one from Russia and one from the United States—come together to tackle these questions with an integrated approach that draws on the law of both countries

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

Building safer robots: Safety driven control

In recent years there has been a concerted effort to address many of the safety issues associated with physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). However, a number of challenges remain. For personal robots, and those intended to operate in unstructured environments, the problem of safety is compounded. In this paper we argue that traditional system design techniques fail to capture the complexities associated with dynamic environments. We present an overview of our safety-driven control system and its implementation methodology. The methodology builds on traditional functional hazard analysis, with the addition of processes aimed at improving the safety of autonomous personal robots. This will be achieved with the use of a safety system developed during the hazard analysis stage. This safety system, called the safety protection system, will initially be used to verify that safety constraints, identified during hazard analysis, have been implemented appropriately. Subsequently it will serve as a high-level safety enforcer, by governing the actions of the robot and preventing the control layer from performing unsafe operations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the design, a series of experiments have been conducted using a MobileRobots PeopleBot. Finally, results are presented demonstrating how faults injected into a controller can be consistently identified and handled by the safety protection system. © The Author(s) 2012