I believe that one of the best ways to get the training you need for a job market in robotics is to attend tutorials at conferences like ICRA. Unlike workshops where you might listen to some work-in-progress, other workshop paper presentations and panel discussions, tutorials are exactly what they sound like. They aim to give you some hands-on learning sessions on technical tools/skills with specific learning objectives.

As such, most tutorials would expect you to come prepared to actively participate and follow along. For instance, the “Tools for Robotic Reinforcement Learning” tutorial expects you to come knowing how to code in python and have basic knowledge of reinforcement learning because you’ll be expected to use those skills/knowledge in the hands-on sessions.

There are seven tutorials this year.

Those interested in the intersection of machine learning and robotics (yes, yes, robotics and AI don’t refer to the same things, even if many people think they are the same) might find the following tutorials interesting.

• Tools for Robotic Reinforcement Learning
• Data-driven revolution in autonomous driving
• Learning Motion Control for Mobile Robot Navigation – A Tutorial

For those who are more into robots that navigate around our environment, the NavAbility Tutorial Workshop on Non-Gaussian SLAM and Computation is a series of hands-on tutorials that would be highly interesting for you. Be prepared to come with your own laptop to go from getting to know non-gaussian SLAM to solve your SLAM problems.

Meanwhile, roboticists who are more hardware and design-oriented might find the Jamming in Robotics: From Fundamental Building Blocks to Robotic Applications tutorial useful. By “jamming”, they don’t mean musicians coming together to create cool music together — I only found this out through the tutorial website. It refers to the way robots can grab items without needing to have traditional, fingered grippers.

The Tutorial on Koopman Operator and Lifting Linearization: Emerging Theory and Applications of Exact Global Linearization would be interesting for anyone interested in mathy/control/theory side of robotics. Koopman operators have been the buzz in the robotics community recently, and the tutorial is sure to give you the in-depth look at what the buzz is all about.

Lastly, the How to write an R-article and benchmark your results tutorial is one to watch for. It will tell you all about publishing reproducibility-friendly articles, and emphasize the usefulness of doing research in reproducible ways.

Dear robotics graduate students and newcomers to robotics,

If you are what I imagine delving into robotics to be like today, the majority of your time is spent as follows:

• navigating Slack channels while tuning into some online lectures,
• trying to figure out whether you should be reading more papers, coding more, or if you are just a slow reader/coder/etc,
• and if you are a grad student, in particular, having a never-ending cycle of self-doubt questions that seem super important, such as “what is a research question anyway? And how do you find one that no one has tackled before — and not because it’s a dumb question? Oh wait… is my question dumb? Can I find out without asking my prof?”

Much of the questions I had as a grad student stemmed from my lack of knowledge about what is considered to be normal by academia, the robotics community, and more narrowly the subdomain of robotics I belonged to. The friends/colleagues/people I met along the way helped me fill that much-needed knowledge gap about the norm because many of us were on the same journey with similar struggles/questions.

As an assistant professor who spent the majority of my professorship in the COVID-19 pandemic mode, I worry that my students’ grad school journey has not offered the same kind of shared experience and camaraderie with people in the domain that I am now seeing the huge benefit of.

The upcoming IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2022 will be the first robotics conference that many of you attend in-person since the pandemic (I’m in this category). For many of you, it may be your first time attending an academic conference. For even more of you, this may be your first virtual attendance at ICRA.

ICRA is a multi-track, full-week of robotics festivity that draws in thousands. It can pass by you in a blink.

So, in a series of short blog posts (because, who has the time these days), I am going to highlight a few things in the form of a millennial’s guide to ICRA.

I’m assuming that you, the reader, may be as impatient a reader as I am, who likes information presented in a short, snappy, and organized way. The more bullet points the better.

So let’s get started.

** Full disclosure, I’m one of the two publicity co-chairs for the ICRA conference. If you want to be on the grounds of ICRA as a student science communicator, reach out to us. **

Join us at the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017) for a full day workshop that will bring together international stakeholders in robotics to examine best practices for accelerating robotics innovation through strategic policy frameworks.

Best practices in designing effective roadmaps for robotics innovation

IROS Workshop | 8:30-17:00 September 28, 2017 | Vancouver Convention Centre | Vancouver BC

This is a unique opportunity to learn from people who have played a significant role in designing and implementing major strategic robotics initiatives around the globe.

Objectives
In the past decade, a number of governing bodies and industry consortia have developed strategic roadmaps to guide investment and development of robotic technology. With the roadmaps from the US, South Korea, Japan and EU etc. well underway, the time is right to take stock of these strategic robotics initiatives to see what is working, what is not, and what best practices in roadmap development might be broadly applied to other regions.

The objective of this two-part workshop is to examine the process of how these policy frameworks came to be created in the first place, how they have been tailored to local capabilities and strengths, and what performance indicators are being used to measure their success — so that participants may draw from international collective experience as they design and evaluate strategic robotics initiatives for their own regions.

Program Part ONE — Morning Session: “Developing innovation policy for robotics, and establishing key performance indicators that are relevant to your region”
The morning session will feature international speakers who have played a significant role in launching and shaping major strategic robotics initiatives across the globe. The focus of this session will be on the history and process of designing the roadmap (rather than on merely presenting the roadmap itself) and key performance indicators of roadmap success. Via presentations and panel discussion, the outcome of this session will be an exploratory overview of best practices and key performance metrics, so that participants can apply knowledge gained from the workshop as they design strategic robotics policy frameworks for their own regional or national contexts.

Program Part TWO — Afternoon Session: “Towards a national robotics strategy for Canada”
The afternoon session will bring together leading Canadian robotics experts from academia, industry, federal/provincial policy, and the national research council to discuss and strategize the future of robotics in Canada, with an emphasis on addressing the social, economic, legal/ethical and regulatory issues, and the robotics strengths and capabilities specific to this country. The main goals of this session will be to 1) establish a clear picture of the internal Canadian robotics landscape and how it compares to other nations worldwide, 2) discuss lessons learned in the International session within the Canadian context, and 3) discuss and identify gaps and opportunities for a Canadian initiative. Ultimately the Canadian session will serve as a venue for collecting data and viewpoints to support the development of a Canadian Robotics Roadmap.

Who should attend
This workshop is open to all members of academia, government, and industry with an interest in funding, policy and research strategy.

Part One of the workshop (morning session) will be broadly applicable to anyone with an interest in robotics policy, partnerships and funding.

Part Two (afternoon session) will be of particular interest to Canadian conference-goers as well as those who are interested in Canadian research and industry partnerships.

Call for participation
We are actively seeking participants for this workshop. If you are …

… involved in developing or evaluating a major strategic robotics initiative in your region and would like to participate in our international discussion, OR …

… are a member of the Canadian robotics ecosystem or are a Canadian roboticist living abroad who would like to be involved in a national robotics strategy for Canada …

… then please send an email with your expression of interest to: info@canadianroboticsnetwork.com. We look forward to hearing from you!!

Workshop Organizers

• Elizabeth Croft, Director, Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CARIS) Lab, UBC
• Clément Gosselin, Professor, Laboratoire de Robotique, Université Laval
• Paul Johnston, Research Policy Consultant, former President of Precarn Incorporated
• Dana Kulić, Associate Professor, Adaptive Systems Laboratory, University of Waterloo
• AJung Moon, Co-Founder & Director, Open Roboethics Institute
• Angela Schoellig, Assistant Professor, Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), University of Toronto
• Hallie Siegel, Strategic Foresight & Innovation @ OCAD U, former Managing Editor @Robohub

Workshop Registration

Registration for IROS workshops is separate from the IROS conference fee. Please see the IROS Website for details: http://www.iros2017.org/registration-travel/registration# 

Early workshop registration deadline: July 22nd.

More Info
http://canadianroboticsnetwork.com/iros-workshop/
http://www.iros2017.org/program/workshops-and-tutorials

Contact
info@canadianroboticsnetwork.com

Earlier this year, the Robots Podcast team came across a story about two 17 year old twin sisters who started their own robotics outreach group. The story about the Tipperman sisters got us curious. What kind of robotics outreach activities are out there to inspire children? Do any of these activities make a difference in getting more girls interested in robotics?

In this episode, AJung Moon conducted a series of three interviews. She spoke to the Tipperman sisters to find out more about their activities, and with Ross Mead, a PhD student who has years of experience organizing robotics events and inspiring young minds. She then talks with Professor Elizabeth Croft, a roboticist who also studies the topic of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Hannah and Rachael Tipperman

Hannah and Rachael Tipperman are high school seniors. They became interested in robotics almost “accidentally” when Hannah participated in a one-time robotics workshop for middle school girls. Since then, they have participated in the FIRST Lego League, FIRST Tech Challenge, FIRST Robotics Challenge, and they founded and captain their school’s Vex Robotics Team. They developed Robot Springboard in the summer between 9th and 10th grade as a way of “paying it forward” and helping other children and communities learn more about, and become involved in, robotics. They run week-long programs in robotics and computing for communities as diverse as Homer, Alaska and Monteverde, Costa Rica. They have also run a week-long “Robot Springboard Technology Camp @ Drexel University” for middle school girls with the help and support of the National Center for Women and Information Technology and Drexel University.

This past year, they launched BrightStart Robotics, a program tailored to younger children (kindergarten through 3rd grade) and their parents. The BrightStart program has been remarkably successful and has hosted over 100 parents and 100 children in the past year. They are presently training other high school students to help run these programs. Hannah and Rachael Tipperman plan to pursue studies in Computer Science in college.

Ross Mead

Ross Mead is a Computer Science PhD student, former NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and former fellow of the USC Body Engineering Los Angeles program (part of the NSF GK-12 initiative). His research focuses on the principled design and modeling of fundamental social behaviors (such as social spacing, eye gaze, gesturing, turn-taking, and other nonverbal social cues) that serve as building blocks to facilitate natural face-to-face human-robot interactions. For over a decade, Ross has been involved with robotics outreach programs, such as Botball and FIRST, serving as an international program instructor, regional coordinator, competition designer, event host, technical mentor, and seasoned competitor. His Master Thesis was designed and implemented using hardware and software platforms used in these outreach programs, demonstrating the applicability of inexpensive and accessible technologies in real-world scenarios. Over the years, Ross has worked directly with thousands of K-12 and higher-education students, in an effort to improve the understanding of STEM principles and promote the pursuit of STEM studies and careers. Ross is the first to have formally introduced sociable robotics into the standard K-12 curriculum; this distinguishes itself from traditional robotics activities, which tend to focus on tasks that are “dirty, dangerous, and dull” for a human to perform. His goal is to use sociable robotics topics to increase interest and self-efficacy of K-12 students underrepresented in STEM, such as females, African-Americans, Latinos/Latinas, and Native Americans.

Elizabeth Croft

Elizabeth A. Croft is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Associate Dean, Education and Professional Development for the Faculty of Applied Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She holds the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering, BC/Yukon at UBC and leads the Westcoast Women in Engineering, Science, and Technology (WWEST) program.

Elizabeth founded WWEST in order to attract, recruit, and retain women in engineering and science careers. WWEST works at national, regional, and local levels with organizations engaged in increasing the number of women in science, engineering, and technology (SET) disciplines through multilateral partnerships spanning community, academic, and private sector partners. Elizabeth frequently gives talks and runs educational sessions to promote women in engineering from elementary school through graduate studies, academe and industry careers. She has received numerous awards for her activities promoting women in engineering.

She is also the director of the Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at UBC. Her research investigates how robotic systems interact with people, and be perceived to behave, in a safe, predictable, and helpful manner.

Links:

• Download mp3 (21.8MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Robot Springboard
• Ross Mead
• Elizabeth Croft

Last week the Waterloo-based Clearpath publicly pledged not to develop lethal autonomous weapons, otherwise known as “killer robots”. In an open letter to the public, Clearpath’s CTO Ryan Gariepy wrote to support the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an international coalition that is spearheading the efforts to stop lethal autonomous weapons systems from being developed and deployed. While the Campaign has garnered significant support since its launch, it has not previously had support from the for-profit robotics sector – making Clearpath’s public statement a noteworthy demonstration of corporate responsibility , particularly given the company’s background in military applications. During a short interview with Gariepy at Clearpath, he summarized the letter as:

“When it comes to lethal weapons systems, not only do we not build them, we don’t believe anybody should build them. That’s our big statement here.”

But that’s just a small part of the story.

Clearpath’s statement is important because it demonstrates how the robotics industry can actively participate in the process of designing the ethical and legal landscape of our robotic future. It essentially sets a precedence of what corporate social responsibility will mean as more robots start to roll out.

Gariepy says,

We do feel that it’s the right thing to do. We’ve looked at potential risks to the business, and we feel that though there is risk to our business, this statement supports what our team believes … and what our partners believe.

Believing in something is one thing, but making it publicly known is another. And on the surface, many robotics companies will have more to lose than to gain from making a public statement on this issue, especially those (such as Clearpath) with military contracts. However, compared to large publicly traded companies such as Samsung (which manufactures sentry robots) or iRobot (which makes battlefield robots in addition to robot vacuum cleaners), Clearpath may be young and nimble enough to set such a precedent without long term negative consequences.

Only five years old, and not publicly traded, Clearpath made the decision to take a public stance on the Killer Robots issue based on the wishes of its 56 employees. According to Gariepy, the Canadian company has been following the issue closely since Christof Heyns (United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions) published a report on this topic for the UN in April 2013. Right before Christmas of last year, Clearpath’s employees spent a Friday afternoon debating the topic of lethal autonomous weapons. This led to an internal poll to determine employee consensus on the issue, followed by the drafting of the public statement.

Clearpath is not saying that any and all military robots are bad, and they are very clear about this in the letter. In fact, developing robots for military application is at the heart of the company, which started off with a handful of University of Waterloo Mechatronics Engineering graduates building a robot to clear minefields. Mine-clearing robots are less controversial than lethal autonomous weapons systems, pointing to the existence of a grey area between the different uses of military robotics and whether they result in a net positive for the society. Yet Clearpath has drawn a line in that grey area – something no other robotics company has yet stepped up to do.

After the launch of the Campaign in 2013, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots travelled to Canada urging the Canadian government to support the cause. According to Executive Director of Mines Action Canada Paul Hannon, the Canadian government’s Foreign Affairs and National Defence departments are still discussing the issue internally and have yet to formally declare Canada’s position. So I asked Hannon whether he thinks being a Canadian company would have made it easier for Clearpath:

Being the first commercial company in the world to make such a statement took a lot of courage I think, no matter where the company is based. It is clear from the statement that they have given it very serious thought and understand the impact it could have.

My personal view is that is probably harder for a Canadian company than an American one because so much R&D funding comes from outside of Canada particularly the US. Canadian companies likely need to develop partnerships with other non-Canadian firms to access those sources of funding. Taking such a principled stand could impact current and potential partnerships, so more credit to them.

 

My intuition is that Clearpath’s attention to roboethics issues will prove to be business savvy in the long run. Robotics has had a difficult time gaining social acceptance – largely because of the ways it has been portrayed in dystopian science fiction, but also because of the inhumanity it can project onto the battlefield. As more robots start rolling out into familiar places such as our homes and offices, the call for roboethics will grow stronger, and this will surely impact the kinds of robots we will allow our governments to deploy in military applications. Public trust is at stake, and the companies that are transparent about where they stand on roboethics issues stand a greater chance of social acceptance.

Roboethics will be a natural avenue for companies to show their social responsibility , and I remain optimistic that we will see more positive movement in this direction. Google’s establishment of an Ethics Board following their acquisition of the AI company DeepMind is perhaps further evidence of this.

I second Hannon who says,

Let’s hope that more companies from many countries follow their lead.

I have my fingers crossed.

A brief history of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots

It’s been a long time coming in the history of military robotics to reach this point.

I first became interested in roboethics after learning about Samsung’s sentry robot used to monitor the demilitarized zone between the South and North Korea. That was almost a decade ago. Of course long before that, military use of unmanned aerial vehichles (UAVs) was on the rise.

With the persistent and increased use of UAVs in military applications, it became obvious that a natural next step in the technological evolution of the remotely operated UAVs was to develop highly autonomous versions of them. The discussion of lethal autonomous weapons systems among academics became heated, as you’ll find from the 2009 two-part robots podcast interviews with Noel Sharkey and Ron Arkin.

A public call to ban the development and deployment of autonomous lethal weapons happened more recently when the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) – one of the key player NGOs involved in the Campaign – drafted it in 2010. Back then, only a handful of academics and interested individuals signed up to support their cause.

ICRAC, along with Human Rights Watch, Article 36, and Mines Action Canada among other well-known international non-governmental organizations, started the campaign in April 2013, which got the United Nations to pay attention to the topic with the 117 states parties (87 countries attended the last meeting) of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) this year.

Whether CCW will continue to work on the killer robots topic has yet to be decided, but the next annual meeting is scheduled for November of this year.

Human-robot interaction is a fascinating field of research in robotics. It also happens to be the field that is closely related to many of the ethical concerns raised with regards to interactive robots. Should human-robot interaction (HRI) practitioners keep in mind things such as human dignity, psychological harm, and privacy? What about how robot design relates to racism and sexism?

Dr. Laurel D. Riek worked on a code of ethics for HRI practitioners with Dr. Don Howard, both professors at the University of Notre Dame. They presented their work at the We Robot conference held earlier this year.

Curious to find out more, AJung spoke with Dr. Riek about what motivated them to draft the code of ethics, what is covered, and where they plan to take it. 

Laurel Riek

Laurel Riek is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, where she directs the Robotics, Health, and Communication Lab. Her research interests are in human-robot interaction, social signal processing, and health informatics. Riek’s work explores how to build machines that are socially agile – able to sense, respond, and adapt to human behavior. This includes computationally modeling social context and synchrony, as well as building expressive robots, such as next generation patient simulator systems. Riek received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge and BS in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University. She worked for eight years as a Senior Artificial Intelligence Engineer and Roboticist at MITRE, on projects including search and rescue robotics, unmanned vehicles, and natural language processing. For her research, she has received several high-level awards from MITRE, a Qualcomm Research Award in Computing, and the NSF CAREER Award.

Links:

• Download mp3 (15.5MB)
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• Laurel Riek’s Website
• Robotics, Health, and Communication Lab website

A large robot comes out of an office mailroom carrying a package marked “Urgent” to deliver to the boss upstairs. After navigating down the hall at maximum speed, it discovers someone is already waiting for the elevator. If they cannot both fit in the elevator, is it acceptable for the robot to ask this person to take the next elevator so it can fulfill its urgent delivery duty? What if, instead, there’s someone in a wheelchair already riding the elevator? Should the robot ask this person to vacate the elevator to make room for it to complete its delivery task?

Figuring out appropriate behavior for the simple situation of riding an elevator isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when people hear the word roboethics.^(a) When used together, the words “robot” and “ethics” tend to conjure up futuristic visions of robot uprisings or questions about the rights of sentient, human-like robots. But roboethics isn’t all about the distant future. It’s also very much about addressing the technical and social challenges of designing robots today.

Determining how a robot should act and behave in a variety of situations is a design challenge for researchers aiming to build robots that make a useful and positive addition to society. I and fellow members of the Open Roboethics initiative (ORi) decided that one of the best ways to establish appropriate behavioral guidelines for robots was to involve various stakeholders – industry members, government policymakers, users, and academic experts – in the design process.^(b)

By incorporating their perspectives on robot behavior into a machine-learning algorithm, our research explored an empirical method for designing behavior in situations where the ethical action for a robot isn’t always immediately clear.

Ultimately, the answer to the question “What should a robot do?”, like the question of what a human should do, depends on whom you ask and what cultural, religious, and other beliefs have shaped their values. It may sound daunting to program robots to make the right decisions if humans can’t even agree on what these decisions should be. Yet people from different backgrounds interact every day as neighbors, classmates, and coworkers within shared frameworks that keep them from crossing one another’s ethical boundaries.

Opinions about ethical robot behavior differ not only by person, but also by situation. For instance, someone who is waiting for the elevator and not in a rush when a robot needs the space to deliver an urgent package may readily let the robot take the elevator. But someone in a wheelchair who is already on the elevator and who cannot take the stairs may not feel obligated to leave the elevator for another person, let alone a robot!

As a pilot study to explore how researchers might obtain perspectives on appropriate robot behavior, we asked eight people to consider twelve versions of the elevator scenario in an online survey.¹ Respondents were asked to rank the appropriateness of the robot’s behavior in each scenario. The robot could either:

1. yield by saying, “Go ahead. I will ride the next one,”
2. do nothing and remain standing by the elevator,
3. not yield, say, “I have urgent mail to deliver and need to ride the elevator. Please exit the elevator,” and take the elevator once the person exits, or
4. engage in a dialogue by telling the person that it’s on an urgent mission and asking if they are in a hurry.

The person in this context could be standing with nothing in hand, carrying heavy items, or in a wheelchair. They could also be already inside the elevator when the door opens or waiting for the elevator when the robot approaches. As for the robot, it was delivering either urgent or non-urgent mail.

Using the rankings from our survey respondents, we calculated which of the four behaviors people find most and least appropriate for each possible scenario.

When the robot was delivering urgent mail – regardless of whether the person was in a wheelchair, carrying heavy objects, or inside or outside the elevator – the most appropriate action chosen for the robot was to engage in dialogue with the person, and the least appropriate behavior was to take no action at all. When the robot was on a non-urgent delivery task, respondents wanted the robot to yield to the person, regardless of who they were, and refusing to yield was considered the least appropriate option.

After gathering the survey data, our next step was to incorporate the results into the design of a robot’s behavior. We treated the survey responses as a set of training data, which we fed into a machine-learning algorithm that guides a robot to map out its decisions based on the data.^(c) We programmed the Willow Garage PR2 robot to detect which scenario applies most closely to the situation at hand, then select the response to that scenario that our survey respondents found most favorable.²

Our pilot survey data indicates that, as is the case for humans, ethical behavior is not simply a set of inflexible rules, but is highly dependent on the context of a situation and on communication and interaction with other actors. The emphasis respondents placed on engaging in dialogue suggests that the key to developing robots with ethical decision-making capabilities may lie not in the creation of a set of principles guiding robots to make predetermined decisions, but in the development of robots that can better communicate and negotiate with the people they encounter to reach mutually agreeable outcomes.

Future efforts building on our research might involve designing a robot that can express its internal states in order to articulate the urgency level of its task or how much it wants or needs something. Creating robots that can communicate more like humans may also be valuable. I am currently developing a robot that can engage in the kinds of non-verbal cues humans use to respond to imminent conflicts.³ If the robot finds itself reaching for something at the same time as a person, it exhibits short, jerky motions that suggest hesitation (much like a human would) and indicate that it is aware its “desires” are in conflict with someone else’s.^(d)

Our research demonstrates an empirical method for designing robot behavior based on the norms favored by humans. By gathering data on people’s preferences regarding robot behavior, we can determine how robots should act in particular situations, as well as what variables (urgency of task, needs of surrounding humans, etc.) matter when it comes to determining the right actions for a robot to take. Similar methods of gathering information from people and using it to program appropriate actions for robots can be applied in a wide variety of contexts where humans and robots interact. Roboethics is key to designing robots that can interact with people in an efficient, friendly, and beneficial manner.

This article is part of a series on robots and their impact on society. After its initial publication, the story was picked up by Business Insider. 

As of yesterday, you can get the adorable and versatile humanoid robot NAO from Aldebaran Robotics for yourself, even if you are not an academic or a hardcore developer. According to Génération Robots, a European partner of Aldebaran Robotics, they are selling NAO Next Gen (that’s the fourth of the four versions of NAOs out there) with the starting price of 5628 €. In North America, the RobotsLab is offering NAO for $7990 – down from $16,000.

If you are a roboticist (especially an academic), you’ve surely come across NAO before at your colleagues’ labs, conferences, and exhibition booths. It’s a 25-DOF platform that has been a definite friend to researchers studying human-robot interaction (HRI).

To give you an idea, NAO was at the 9th ACE/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction last week and helped host the voting of the best video awards. On behalf of the chair of the video session, it sat on the podium and instructed the audience to clap and cheer on for the video submissions to be selected for the awards.

Apart from the fact that it has two HD cameras, four microphones, 2 hi-Fi speakers, and has been on TED more than once, this beloved robot comes with fun applications such as “NAO plays soccer”. Although I couldn’t tell you how well the application works, you can check it out for yourself from March 18th to 22nd if you’ll be attending Innorobo this year.

It’s still too pricey to be purchased as the next Christmas present for a child in your family. But it looks like that’s not what Aldebaran and  Génération intends to sell it for anyway. It’s definitely not too expensive as a platform to do HRI research on, use it to start your own robots-at-home or robots-for-entertainment business, or have it as your own personal robot because you’re just that kind of a person.

So, would you buy it? What would you use it for?

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Rethink Robotics and Aldebaran both launch robots for research, teaching and custom development
• “A Paro walks into a club…” (or, Notes on the design of automated body language)
• ICRA 2013 robot photo essay: “Anthropomatics – Technologies for humans”
• ShanghAI Lectures 2012: Lecture 10 “How the body shapes the way we think”
• Robot choreographies
• Robot Companions: Flagship funding proposal for 1 billion euro submitted
• NAO, WALL-E, PackBot and BigDog inducted into Robot Hall of Fame

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Link to audio file (33:53)

What does it mean to have giants like Google, Apple and Amazon investing in robotics? Since last December, Google alone has acquired a handful of companies in robotics, home automation and artificial intelligence. This can be pretty exciting for robotics. But what exactly is the internet giant planning to do with this technology? Is there something we should be worried about? If there is, what can we do about it?

Experts have been actively talking about this in the media, including through Robohub’s recent focus series on Big Deals in Robotics.

In today’s episode, AJung Moon talks with Avner Levin, a privacy and cybercrime expert, about Google’s recent acquisition of companies. Levin sheds light on why we should be concerned about the recent series of acquisitions by the big companies from privacy and cybercrime perspective. He also discusses whether the existing privacy policies are ready to handle what may lie shortly ahead of us in the future — the future of the Internet of Things, or perhaps Google-branded robots.

Avner Levin
Avner Levin is the Chair of the Law & Business Department, as well as the Director of the Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. His research interest is in regulation and protection of privacy with respect to technology within Canada and worldwide. In the interview, he advocates for more discussion of privacy issues to take place, not just within the companies that (do/will) hold our data, but by governing bodies.

Links:

• Download mp3 (15.5MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Avner Levin’s Website

 

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Google’s robot and artificial intelligence acquisitions are anything but scary
• Will companies like Google and Amazon usher in a new era for robotics?
• The robots behind your Internet shopping addiction: How your wallet is driving retail automation
• What do Google, Amazon, IBM, Apple, Microsoft and all the airlines and car companies want?

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

 

It’s exciting for the robotics community that the giants (Google, Apple, and Amazon) are actively investing in robotics.

Indeed, my initial response to hearing about Google’s first seven of a series of acquisitions of robotics-related companies was a very positive one (these companies include Shaft, Industrial Perception, Meka Robotics, Redwood Robotics, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss, and Holomni, see Frank Tobe’s article for more details on these companies). Technologies from these companies are ones that can make robots mobile, perceptive, responsive, and interactive. The fact that the companies are now housed under one giant roof of Google made me imagine a future of next generation robots where Google-branded humanoids will be the next Baxter, working shoulder-to-shoulder with people in dynamic manufacturing environments, or assisting caregivers and serving seniors at care facilities. How could it not be exciting?

Even if Google’s actual direction is to put bipedal robots in self-driving cars so that people can enjoy fast, fully-autonomous door-to-door delivery of flowers on Valentine’s Day, my view was that such investments can only be good for the robotics community. Large scale investments by giant corporations, regardless of what their actual plans are, can have a positive impact on the job market for roboticists, increase competition between the giants and push robotics forward.

Then I began to feel a little bit uneasy when Google acquired Boston Dynamics. That’s because Boston Dynamics is not only a company with one of the most impressive control systems I’ve ever seen (I’m sure many of you will agree with this from the video of Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog, which has over 15 million views on YouTube), but it’s also a company that is known to have developed such impressive systems for the Pentagon, of all clients.

What does this all mean? What is Google planning to do with robots that can keep itself upright after being kicked, walk through rough terrains, run as fast as 29 miles per hour? The combination of Google-acquired companies became even more mysterious when the London-based AI company, DeepMind, was added to the mix. It’s safe to say that the uncertainty over Google’s plans with these companies has stirred up quite a bit of concern to the general public: some media coverage on the topic have been hyping the idea of Google building Skynet or being in the business of building robot soldiers.

Unless Google is indeed headed in those directions, I don’t believe that the public concern about the possibility of human extinction by Google-made robots in the near future is a good thing, either for the company or for the field of robotics in general. I think that public concerns over Google’s investment directions exist today because we, as a society, lack the presence of governing bodies whose role is to ensure that robotics technologies are developed and used for purposes desirable for the society, in manners aligned with society’s values.

However, I do applaud the fact that Google is setting up an ethics board to presumably oversee what they will and will not do with their technologies. If Google takes ethics seriously, I think Google could be a game changer in robotics (although it already is), not just by producing and selling cool robots in the future, but more importantly, by leading the way of tightly coupling ethics in robotics and making robots that “don’t do evil”.

Read more answers →

But when I was asked this month’s Robotics by Invitation question, I gladly put on my imagination hat without much hesitation or cringing. Part of it might have something to do with the fact that no one will come after me and ask “so, when do you think that kind of technology will be available in the future?” So I felt very much free to let my imagination do what it does best.

The first thing that crossed my mind was a vision or an idea Mr. John S. Canning of the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division had discussed many years ago (in 2009 I believe) at a talk he titled “A Concept of Operations for Armed Autonomous Systems”. After thirty-something powerpoint slides, he summarized the talk with “Let the machines target machines – not people”. I think it’s a cool notion to think about building robots that are not built as ultimate killing machines, but built as the ultimate weapon-neutralizing machines. Imagine that, instead of targeted killing of humans, you send robots for targeted neutralization of weapons?

After coming across that summary, I remember thinking how useful it would be if I had an expandable, hidden robotic device implanted on my forearm, such that when I (if ever) need to go neutralize someone’s weapon, or protect myself from someone attacking me (for whatever reason), the device will automatically activate, expand into a bullet-proof shield, and help me detect dangerous weapons in the area to neutralize. If it comes with a mini jet-pack that allows me to fly, that’s even better. I’d be the ultimate superwoman whose day-job is to do research in robotics, but with a side job to fly to random places and help out with conflict situations. Ok, that sounds like a plot from a comic book.

Some of you might think I sound like I’m dreaming to be a female version of Iron Man. But I am thinking of something more subtle (at least while the device isn’t activated), like the Inspector Gadget (for those of you who don’t know him, Inspector Gadget was a cartoon character that could hide all of his cyborg gadgetry inside his trench coat). I would look just like a normal person, except that, when necessary, my ‘implanted devices’ would activate to serve whatever various purposes I need.

That’s only if you are asking me about implants. But if you are asking me about robotic accessories, then that’s a whole different story. Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a foldable and light pocket-sized device that you could carry with you while travelling (or grocery shopping), so that when you don’t want to carry heavy things, you could just activate it, and it would become a full sized stair-climber and a follow-bot? It would have come in very handy if I had such a device during my trip to Europe, hopping between trains and planes with my luggage. I don’t think I’d use anything bigger or heavier than my purse for this purpose, because that defeats the purpose.

Anyone have one of these available for testing yet?

Read more answers →

I’m not saying this just because I’m biased by the recent news reporting on how large companies (Amazon, DHL, and UPS to be exact) are exploring the use of drones as a new delivery mechanism. If this is news to you, don’t worry. The robotics community came across this only a couple of weeks ago. Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it has been developing a drone-based delivery service called Amazon Prime Air that is meant to delivery items to your door in about half an hour. Then came a series of reports by other companies claiming that they are looking into similar ideas themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98BIu9dpwHU

But these drones are not going to be flying above your backyard any time soon because the world needs to figure out how to regulate drone technologies first. Many people still associate the word ‘drone’ with controversial military technologies despite the use of drones for journalism, mapping and search and rescue missions.

That reminds me of another drone-related news story from this year: in April, a coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) called the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots was launched. With a thorough discussion on the current use of drones (remote controlled), the organization argued in front of the UN that an extended, more autonomous version of the current robotic military technologies could be dangerous at a global scale. By November of this year, this group had already grown into the organization that got the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, talking about killer robots to the nations.

Of course drones didn’t invade the robotics news world all year long. Some of us may have forgotten this already, but Willow Garage, the company that enabled so many roboticists to adopt the open source mindset and stop reinventing the wheel with ROS and PR2, shook the robotics community earlier this year by shutting down (most of its employees joined Suitable technologies according to the last blog post from Willow Garage).

If I were to think about Willow Garage and the rise of delivery drones in a one-dimensional manner, it would seem that the state of robotics industry is in rocky waters, where there’s a lot of interest in making money using non-traditional robotics (i.e., not the stereotypical industrial robots), but it is still hard to tell how many of these new business ventures will be successful. But thinking of it in another dimension, I think 2013 was the year that demonstrated the complicated nature of robotics, not in terms of just the technical stuff that goes in it, but in terms of its relationship with societal, ethical, and legal issues — whether it be discussing the efficacy of open source robotics or societal acceptance of drones in civilian territories.

Read more answers →

Link to audio file (34:30)

In this episode, AJung Moon talks to Julie Carpenter, a recent graduate of the University of Washington who interviewed 23 U.S. Military Explosive Ordnance Disposal personnel to find out how they interact with everyday field robots. Julie is currently writing a book on the topic that is scheduled to be published next year.

Julie Carpenter

Julie Carpenter has received her doctoral degree in Education at the University of Washington with her dissertation titled The Quiet Professional: An investigation of U.S. Military Explosive Ordnance Disposal personnel interactions with everyday field robots. She primarily studies emotional attachment issues in human-robot interaction, and how it affects user decision-making in collaborative, sometimes stressful, situations.

Find out more about Julie and her work on her website.

Links:

• Download mp3 (17.3MB)
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• Julie Carpenter’s Website

My bet is that by the time you buy your very first robotic butler, it will have a friendly head on it that moves. In fact, it would be a good idea to make robots with heads if they are intended to share spaces and objects with people. That’s because the head is a really expressive part of our body we naturally use (a lot) to convey essential information to each other.  Robots will need to do the same if they are going to hang out with us soft-tissued human beings at our homes and offices.

For example, when people are attending to something, they tend to be looking at the thing they are attending to. People also look at the direction they are headed when they walk, and make eye contact when they talk. People nod with their head when they want to show agreement about what is being said. Without these nonverbal cues from the head interacting with each other would be much more difficult, because we wouldn’t know what each other are doing.

Rodney Brooks, a pioneer in robotics and now Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics, had this in mind when he built Baxter. Although Baxter’s arms are as bulky-looking as its traditional industrial robotics predecessors, one of the innovative components of it is the fact that it features a moving head that makes its interaction with not-so-trained users very intuitive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OIxWMTrGl8

If robots are to do meaningful things around us in a safe manner, it’s essential that we know what the robot is attending to, where it is headed, and what it is about to do – a lot of which a robot head can help with. That way, we won’t have to be a roboticist to know when it is safe to be around a robot holding on to a giant knife to make you cucumber salad. <optionally embed cucumber slicing robot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvDXrZX-SCA

Link to audio file (29:07)

In this episode, AJung talks to Peter Asaro from The New School in New York city about autonomous weapons systems. Peter tells us about the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an international consortium of NGOs working together to ban autonomous weapons systems. You can read our full coverage of the campaign here, or have a look at our special focus series on robots and warfare.

Peter Asaro
Peter Asaro is an Assistant Professor at The New School and an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. As a Co-founder and Vice-Chair for the International Committee for Robot Arms Control founded in 2009, Peter has been thinking, talking, and writing about lethal robots for many years. Computer scientist and philosopher by training, he is one of the leading figures in roboethics urging scientists to join the Scientists’ Call to ban autonomous lethal weapons.

Links:

• Download mp3 (15.2MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Peter Asaro’s website
• International Committee for Robot Arms Control website
• Campaign to Stop Killer Robots website
• The Scientists’ Call to ban autonomous lethal weapons

This post is part of Robohub’s We Robot coverage.

Paper: A Licensing Approach to Regulation of Open Robotics
Author: Diana Marina Cooper
Moderator: Michael Froomkin

Last year when Willow Garage announced that the company will be changing its funding model there was a few hours of confusion where some people thought the open source robotics company was going to shut down. The robotics community was shocked to hear the news– later found to be erroneous. Reaction from the research community in particular was that of a panic.

That is because a lot of robotics researchers have been depending on continued existence of the company’s products, especially the open source Robot Operating System (ROS). Currently there are over 90 known institutions all over the world contributing repositories to the ROS community alone, and the number of contributions to the community has been increasing exponentially. And that’s just considering ROS and not the other open robotics communities that exist throughout the world.

Given the popularity of open source communities and its rapid growth it is not surprising that open source was a hot topic of discussion at the We Robot 2013 conference last month. Intellectual property of open source systems was discussed during a panel, power of open source was emphasized during the Robotics Industry Roundtable, and a new license for open robotics was proposed. Part of the discussions involved open robotics as a cause of societal and legal concerns.

Typically, in research institutes, there are a set of rules in place to prevent people from damaging equipment, harming others, and harming people who work within the facility. Outside institutional hierarchy, however, only few things restrict or prevent creative and technically inclined individuals from taking open and easily accessible robotics technologies and creating whatever they wish. That is even if the product is meant to serve horrific ends.

For example, apart from my own set of moral principles, there’s nothing stopping me from taking a LEGO Mindstorm kit, attaching a set of sensors, motors, gears, and a knife together to make a dangerous, yet autonomous tabbing machine of some sort. Not to make things too dramatic, but anyone above the age of 10 can play with LEGO Mindstorms and build robots.

That makes liability issues a big headache in open robotics, where shared design/code is meant to be modified by end-users, as compared to closed robotics. This liability issue also means that manufacturers are turned off from developing open systems.

Is there a way we can foster open robotics and open source communities while addressing these concerns?

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”. You can watch the full panel discussion from We Robot above.

Image from http://presta-ecommerce.com/

Included in the license are positive obligations of designers such as having default privacy setting where people need to opt-in for data collection, disclosure, and use of personal information. The current draft of the license envisions people registering their work to a central database and to keep it up to date of the modifications.

There are also restrictions that are aimed to address the ‘open source robotics for horrific end’ scenario above. Under ERL, you may not make robots that have self-defence capabilities, use or modify robots as a weapon, or make robots that perform certain law enforcement functions, such as surveillance, interrogation and executions. Certain restrictions on military/defense use of robots are also outlined in the license.

As Brad Templeton pointed out during the panel, open source communities value the freedom to share, modify and use technologies. It is curious whether the license that imposes added restrictions will be well received by the communities.

Cooper acknowledges that there’s still more work to be done on the license itself before it can be operationalized. She also agrees that this license doesn’t stop people from doing things that the license is meant to restrict. Nonetheless, given the fact that so many roboticists and hobbyists already benefit from open robotics and – I believe – do not intend their shared work to be used for building robots that harm people and society, the ERL could act as a mechanism to overcome various ethical, legal, and societal concerns pertaining to open robotics.

What do you think about the Ethical Robot License or the idea of regulating open robotics through licensing approach? Let us know in the comments below.

See all the We Robot coverage on Robohub →

Looking at the two words together is enough to conjure up images of chaos and destruction.  They’re an image far too familiar in science fiction settings such as Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke. It’s also a concept many A.I. researchers will gladly tell you they’ve been plagued with at least once by friends or colleagues.  However, how much of a real ethical concern do they pose for society?

Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams and Noel Sharkey from the International Committee for Robot Arms Control at the launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Photo by Peter Asaro.

In November of last year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) at Harvard Law School jointly published a 50-page report on the topic of killer robots. The report, titled Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots, outlined many legal, ethical, and other concerns pertaining to the use of fully autonomous weapons (previously covered by Mike Hamer of Robohub). Some of the concerns outlined include unsolved and important roboethics questions such as “who is legally responsible for a robot’s actions?”

Maybe this question doesn’t have to be answered (not right away at least) if we simply stop the use and development of killer robots all together.

Earlier this week, on April 23, a new global campaign named the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots was launched with this very idea of stopping killer robots. Composed of over twenty international NGOs in ten countries, the campaign’s focus is to ban the development, production and use of future lethal robot weapons or “killer robots” that could autonomously locate and neutralize human targets.

Addressing countries such as China, Russia, Israel and the United States that are currently moving to create systems to give greater autonomy to combat robots, the campaign believes it would pose a challenge to international human rights and humanitarian law.

Photo by Peter Asaro

Fully autonomous weapons aren’t really roaming around war zones today (yet). So this campaign is preemptive. But given that we have so many precursor technologies out there already — I mean, who doesn’t know about the drone technologies used for targeted attacks today? — it seems that developing and deploying autonomous weapons is an obvious next step. But this obvious next step could lead to a tragic case of a robotic arms race. Taking actions to ban it now makes more sense than to ban it when it’s too late.

In 2009, Robots Podcast interviewed Noel Sharkey (Professor of A.I. And Robotics at the University of Sheffield, and spokesperson of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots) and Ronald Arkin (Regent’s Professor and Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology), and both experts addressed the issue of ethics of robot soldiers.  As Sharkey argued, the problem of robots autonomously identifying targets lies within the Principle of Discrimination (part of the international Laws of War described in the Geneva Convention) (listen to his interview here).  In it, soldiers must not harm a civilian, non combatant, the immensely ill or prisoners of war. According to Sharkey, no A.I. system can reliably discriminate between soldiers and civilians.  A robot, for the moment, “can’t have a sense of ethics” necessary to make the humanistic decisions required by soldiers.

An opposing viewpoint is provided by Arkin. According to Arkin, robot soldiers carry an inherent danger but depending on their implementation, it could provide better safety and non-combatants for soldiers (listen to his interview here).  As Arkin argues, robots are not affected by emotions such as fear or anger that can sometimes cloud soldier’s better judgment on the field — although simulation of certain emotions such as guilt could be used to improve a robot’s decision making algorithm.

Despite the contrasting views, both Sharkey and Arkin were in agreement in 2009 that as it stands, autonomous robots are not prepared for battlefield. The Losing Humanity report from last year echos this viewpoint. The launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is timely, and comes one month ahead of Christof Heyns‘ (United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions) delivery of  his report on lethal autonomous robotics to the UN Human Rights Council.

So what can we, roboticists, politicians, or the public do in support of the campaign?

You can have your say on the matter by voting on the poll of the Engineer (see left hand column).

Interested individuals can support the campaign by responding to the call to ban lethal autonomous robots by the International Committee for Robot Arms Control’s (ICRAC, a leading NGO member of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots). Interested NGOs can join the campaign by contacting the campaign coordinator.

Or if you’d rather not explicitly support them, but find out more, check out the campaign’s website or the press release .

To keep on top of the news from the campaign, follow the campaign via Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.

This post was prepared jointly by Matthew Ebisu and AJung Moon and first appeared on Roboethics Info Database.

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.

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.”

Mind you, I found out about the book just this morning, so I definitely haven’t read it yet. But I am very curious to find out more about Dr. Nourbakhsh’s view of our future with robots.

For one, Dr. Nourbakhsh teaches a roboethics course at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He even made a roboethics teaching material available to the public online (check it out here if you haven’t already). So I am very much looking forward to his insight into the topic of roboethics as he discusses the future.

The book is now safely sitting in my electronic library waiting to be read and highlighted and pondered over — very exciting!

For those of you interested in finding out more about the author and his connection to ethics of robotics, here’s a YouTube video of a very fun and story-filled lecture Dr. Nourbakhsh gave at Carnegie Mellon University. Also, be sure to check out his blog as well.  (Warning: you might end up bound to your chair to listen to his lecture for the next 40 minutes as soon as you hit play):

This past weekend, I have been a little bit occupied with the idea of self-awareness and robots. The above video is just for fun of course. But this post isn’t really about the video and how entertaining it is (sorry if I disappointed you). Rather, it’s more about the idea of self-aware robots and our use of the word ‘self-awareness’ (and other similar words) when it comes to talking about robots.

Let’s get started.

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 was fascinated to find that such a group was formed when I was just finishing up my elementary school (i.e., quite a few years ago). Or maybe I should have expected similar groups to have formed years earlier, since 1999 is about 78 years after Karel Čapek‘s famous play R.U.R (a.k.a., Rossum’s Universal Robots) was first premiered. I recommend everyone interested in robots/roboethics to read R.U.R if you haven’t (it’s a fairly short read), since it is an entertaining read and is apparently the book that first introduced the word ‘robot’ into our dictionary (oh, and did I mention that an ebook version of it is free and online?).

For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story of a robot uprising where the robots in the play are almost indistinguishable from humans in appearance. They are all manufactured by a company, R.U.R., located on a remote island. Only a handful of people live and work there, and the rest of the company is run by robots

Of the many memorable scenes in the play, reading up on ASPCR reminded me of a particular part of the introductory scene. It’s the part where one of the characters, Helena, daughter of the president and a visitor to the island, decides to reveal the true reason why she came to see the robots at the factory.

Helena: Your position here. You are people just like we are, for God’s sake, just like anyone else in Europe, anyone else in the world! It’s a scandal, the way you have to live, it isn’t worthy of you!

…

Helena: Brothers, I haven’t come here on behalf of my father. I’m here on behalf of the League of Humanity. Brothers, the League of Humanity now has more than two thousand members. There are two thousand people who are standing up for you and want to help you.

Now, in this scene, Helena thinks she is talking to robots, but is really talking to the handful of humans, directors of various departments within the company. So she ends up mistakenly revealing her plan to the people who run the factory. But the idea is that Helena, a member of the society at large and not an expert in the technology, has formed an organization to advocate for the rights of robots. She goes on to say that the League of Humanity aims to set robots free and have them be treated like people. Of course, the directors (humans) respond by having a good laugh and going on to outline the differences between humans and robots and why they don’t think the League’s goal is a worthwhile endeavor.

As I read through the article and thought about the similarities between Helena’s League of Humanity and ASPCR, I felt the need to take on the role of one of the directors of R.U.R. and talk about how it will be very far into the future before we can legitimately consider robots as self-aware and sentient beings that should have their own set of human-equivalent rights. But ASPCR isn’t necessarily saying that today’s robots are already in need of protection. It just seems that if, hypothetically, we were to have robots that have “genuine intelligence and self-awareness”, then we should give them rights that “we take for granted as humans”.

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?

Anyways, we are nowhere close to building robots that genuinely have human qualities such as self-awareness, morality, etc. There are engineering projects that are inspired by such concepts (e.g., Justin Hart’s project), but their efforts are to implement certain features of these ideas of self-awareness, ethical behaviour etc. on a robot via technical means.

But just because someone is inspired by these ideas does not necessarily mean that we will have robots with human-like self-awareness or other qualities in the near future (near, as in, by the time someone finished his/her PhD on the topic). Just as an FYI, only few animals have passed the mirror test (a classic self-awareness test) to date, and no robots have passed it yet.

It has been my assumption that most engineers understand this difference well, because they know the technical details that an engineering product consists of. Just because I programmed a robot to move in a way that communicates a state of hesitation to people does not mean I built a robot that is capable of hesitating. It just means that I came up with humanlike motion trajectories a robot can follow, and that people perceive the motions as hesitations. Mind you, the robot I used for my study definitely does not have any intentions or higher order cognitive capability that makes it hesitant/communicative.

Likewise, just because a robot is programmed by someone with an algorithm that can select the highest priority task between ‘attend to a crying baby’, ‘turn off the oven’, and ‘get water for the elderly’, does not mean the robot is suddenly equipped with a sense of intention to select a task appropriate for the situation. Today’s robots don’t have intentions. But it does mean that the programmer’s intention to build a robot that accurately selects a high priority task, one that hopefully results in the best or a positive outcome, is reflected in the task selection algorithm.

But as I was pondering about this, I was struck with the realization that this assumption perhaps is not true, and that engineers should really be careful about the way we present our robotics research.

During the seminar, a fellow mechanical engineering student started her presentation on implementing self-awareness for homecare robots.

“What a coincidence,” I thought, “I was just thinking about self-aware robots”.

It turns out that her use of the term ‘self-awareness’ is — somewhat disappointingly — very different from the commonly known definitions of the term:

“an awareness of one’s own personality or individuality” [Merriam-webster] or “the capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals.” [Wikipedia]

Her model of self-awareness came down to a set of variables in her fuzzy logic. She was using ‘self-awareness’ as a collective term to refer to a programmed set of variables in her system.

As interesting as it was to listen to her presentation, I couldn’t help but feel concerned. Perhaps more technically trained individuals today are using vocabulary that could give false impression of their research/work to the lay audience.

Using this kind of vocabulary makes for great headline titles for magazine/newspaper articles. However, they aren’t reflective of what the society would consider to be an acceptable truth. Maybe this is a side effect of the way we, engineers, try to present our work in a more public friendly way. But that doesn’t excuse us from not paying careful attention to whether the public/audience is mislead by our statements (e.g., the audience believing that self-aware robots are a near future issue etc.)

Although we make fun of research sometimes and point out how far and removed some research seems to be from practical application, I think robotics research do make a difference in the world and is one of the research fields most closely connected to the products and applications of today. But the more this is true, the more we should strive to make positive contributions to the society, not just with our technical contributions, but also in ensuring that the public isn’t misguided (by our research) from discerning the realities of what robots are, and can do today.

This article first appeared on Roboethics Info Database.