In September of 2010, the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council(EPSRC )  and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) held a Robotics Retreat which met to discuss robotics, its applications in the real world and the huge amount of promise it offers to benefit society.

Attendees of the retreat included experts in technology, industry, the arts, law and social sciences.  Delegates of the meeting have now drafted a set of 5 ethical rules treating issues relevant to today’s robotics-  as opposed to being a fixed set of laws, the document is intended to serve as a point of reference and a source of information for future debates.

1. Robots are multi-use tools. Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans, except in the interests of national security.
2. Humans, not robots, are responsible agents. Robots should be designed & operated as far as is practicable to comply with existing laws & fundamental rights & freedoms, including privacy.
3. Robots are products. They should be designed using processes which assure their safety and security.
4. Robots are manufactured artifacts. They should not be designed in a deceptive way to exploit vulnerable users; instead their machine nature should be transparent.
5. The person with legal responsibility for a robot should be attributed.

In addition to these principles, delegates from the meeting have also included a set of 7 messages they believe are important to disseminate in order to encourage responsibility within the robotics research and industrial community.

Delegates stress that robotocists need to engage with the public, take responsibility for their public image and understand how people are perceiving their work. They also think it’s imperative to address legitimate concerns about the use of robots, emphasizing the need to  ¨figure out how to engage in conversation about the real abilities of our research with people from a variety of cultural backgrounds who will be looking at our work with a wide range of assumptions, myths and narratives behind them¨.

Paolo Dario, Coordinator of Robot Companions for Citizens, one of the FET Flagship Initiatives,  has investigated how current legal regulations impact on robot deployment in urban environments. Particularly, he has looked at some of the gaps in current legal systems which do not yet allow for proper legal qualification of autonomous mobile robots operating in our urban environments. Dario was one of the authors of a paper titled An Investigation on Legal Regulations for Robot Deployment in Urban Areas: A Focus on Italian Law which was one of 7 papers published as part of a 2010 special edition from  The journal of Advanced Robotics  titled Legal and Safety Constraints for Service Robots Deployment.

Hiro, a humanoid robot developed by professor Osamu Hasegawa at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has been proclaimed a ¨world first¨for its ability to ¨learn¨from its environment and research relevant information on the web.

While Hiro seems to be an impressive robot, he’s not in a league of his own. Experts in the field have been focused on developing these types of ¨learning¨robots for quite sometime. However, the fact that these types of robots are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, emphasizes the need to get the word on the street! “I want people to know we already have this kind of technology. We want people with different backgrounds and in different fields to discuss how it should be used, while it is still in its infancy” states professor Hasegawa in an article on Hiro.

As expressed in the article, this type of robot could be useful for a wide range of purposes— domestic, traffic control, and even earthquake detection. Dr. Vincent C. Müller, the research coordinator for the project EUCogII,  was one of 400 experts who attended the 2011 European Robotics Forum earlier this year in Västerås, Sweden.  Müller believes cognitive robots could  hold the key to solving situations like Fukushima, whose unfolding events cannot be predicted. “We need to focus on developing intelligent, flexible, biologically inspired alternatives.  Robots of the future need to be less like laptops and more like cockroaches, adaptive and low power”.

Paolo Dario, head of one of the European Commission’s 2011 Flagship Initiatives:  Robot Companions for Citizens,  was another expert present in Västerås. He describes the robots his team is aiming to develop as ¨apprentices able to learn from experience, to understand the goals of their actions, to adapt to contingencies and to anticipate, in a developmental and evolutionary way, the intentions of their human companions.¨

Approximately as large as pills, these tiny robots are made to self-assemble in a human stomach

Earth’s little critters give scientists big ideas

Paolo Dario is a Professor of Biomedical Robotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa who is heavily involved in the study of micro-machines for medical purposes. In coordination with 3 other European Universities, Paolo headed the The ARES Project (Assembling Reconfigurable Endoluminal Surgical system) which ran from 2006-2009. The project aimed to develop tiny robots as new surgical tools, capable of entering the human body via oral ingestion or  a minimally invasive incision. While this project specifically focused on the investigation and development of a surgical robot for the gastrointestinal tract, technology such as this can also be applied to the study of the urinary tract and the circulatory and respiratory systems. Where do researchers look for inspiration for the development of these types of machines?

Well, why not worms? Simple invertebrate animals provide scientists with many tips and tricks on how to maneuver through a slippery and unstructured environment such as a human stomach. Find out more about this project in an article featured in last year’s Scientific American. You can also read about the full ARES project HERE

DustCart robot featured in Livorno, Italy 2010

Dario heads many other research projects such as  DustCart project (pictured right) which aims to solve problems for waste authorities across Europe.  He is also the director for the coordination action of the Robot Companions for Citizens FET Flagship.