Responsible Robotics workshop: Robots with and for society

In the context of the international conference RO-MAN 2022 “31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication”, the European funded project Robotics4EU will organise the workshop RESP-R “Responsible Robotics: Robots with and for society”. This workshop aims to contribute to the exchange of knowledge between academia and industry on how to better design responsible robots, but also on how to assess the acceptance of these robots by society. This event will bring the opportunity to continue the dialogue on responsible robotics: issues, stakes, impact, good practices, etc.

Robotics4EU consortium members will share the main takeaways gathered in our numerous previous consultation activities (more than 2,000 stakeholders, incl. 700 citizens consulted) and present the intermediate version of the maturity assessment model.

Above all, the floor will be given to the audience and invited experts to debate on the topic, and share their own experience. A panel discussion with external experts will shed light on works on design and assessment methods, and polls and interactive activities will allow direct interaction with the audience.

We fully hope to meet you at RO-MAN, either as a member of the audience or as a selected author.

DRAFT AGENDA

PAPERS PRESENTED AT THE EVENT

This year’s RO-MAN conference theme is robots and human interactive communication. It covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. In that sense, to encourage the dissemination of innovative tools, actions, and strategies for enhancing the acceptance of robots by society, we’ve opened a call for papers related to several topics connected with the event’s theme. The selected ones will be presented at the event. Get to know them*:

*You can read the abstracts of each paper at the END of this article.

ORGANISERS

• Dr. Agnes DELABORDE, LNE – Laboratoire national de métrologie et d’essais (national laboratory for metrology and testing)

• Anneli ROOSE – Civitta

• Dr. Roger Andre SØRAA, NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology

• Yu CHENG, NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology

To participate in the Conference and the RESP-R workshop, follow the registration process at IEEE RO-MAN 2022 through the box below.

For more info contact us at: resp-r@robotics4EU.eu

PAPER ABSTRACTS

Surveying public attitudes towards the use of surgery robots in Europe:

Current surgical robots are an extension of surgeons’ arms and an essential aid in supporting doctors autonomously in crucial surgery moments. A growing part of the literature has expanded the knowledge on these medical devices’ legal and regulatory aspects, such as safety, control, responsibility, performance, and cost. Between 2015 and 2019, Special Eurobarometers conducted by the EU indicated that people were uncomfortable with robots caring for older adults or performing surgery on them. Despite these findings, surgery automation has advanced silently in recent years, and many hospitals currently include robot-assisted surgeries. Given the apparent disconnect between surgical technology advancements and general public perception toward robots and autonomous systems, we survey the European public attitudes toward surgery automation in this article. Our questionnaire generally sought to re-evaluate and measure surgical robots’ general acceptability and understand and analyze people’s thoughts on autonomous surgery robots. The survey also included critical questions relevant to future policy-making, such as bestowing separate identities to surgery robots and liability allocation mechanisms. The study results differed slightly from previous similar data and denoted a more positive outlook concerning surgery automation.

Engaging Robotics Engineers with Roboethics: Moral and Social Space and Lived Ethics Perspective:

This paper provides an overview of various perspectives on roboethics and points to a gap between the research outcomes, initiatives that have been pursued in this area, and the actual engineering practice in robotics. It proposes to look at roboethics through the perspective of moral and social space and ultimately that of “lived ethics”. The goal is to suggest new analytical frameworks to encourage personal engagement in roboethics among robotics engineers and approach ethics as a way of life.

Model Cards and Datasheets for Autonomous Robot Systems:

Open-source machine learning models and datasets are becoming an increasingly important part of autonomous robot systems. This paper presents a technical and ethical reporting standards for models and datasets review. We show that good standards exist but are currently not sufficiently enforced. To help alleviate this issue, we provide a template for Model Cards and Datasheets, which future autonomous robot system projects can use to report on their models and datasets transparently.

Privacy Expectations for Human-Autonomous Vehicle Interactions:

Robots operating in public spaces, such as autonomous vehicles, will necessarily collect images and other data concerning the people and vehicles in their vicinity, raising privacy concerns. Common conceptions of privacy in robotics do not include the challenges of many-to-many surveillance where fleets of several individual robots collect data on many people during operation. Technologists, legal scholars, and privacy researchers recommend such technologies to fulfill the reasonable privacy expectations of society, but there is no standard method for measuring privacy expectations. We propose an informed method by Contextual Integrity Theory for identifying societal privacy expectations for autonomous vehicle-collected data and codifying the contextual expectations as norms. We present a study (n= 600) that identifies twelve distinct norms, which are made up of contextual factors such as the subject of data collection and the data use.

Desirable Characteristics of Datasets for Assessing Responsible Robots:

Learning-enabled components in robots must be assessed concerning non-functional requirements (NFR) such as reliability, fault tolerance, and adaptability to ease the acceptance of responsible robots into human-centered environments. While many factors impact NFRs, in this paper, we focus on datasets that are used to train learning models that are applied in robots. We describe desirable characteristics for robotics datasets and identify the associated NFRs they affect. The characteristics are described in relation to the variability of the instances in the dataset, out-of-distribution data, the Spatio-temporal embodiment of robots, interaction failures, and lifelong learning. We emphasize the need to include out-of-distribution and failure data in the datasets, both to improve the performance of learning models, and to allow the assessment of robots in unexpected situations. We also stress the importance of continually updating the datasets throughout the lifetime of the robot, and the associated documentation of the datasets for improved transparency and traceability.

Robots and Ethical Governance: A short overview of EU Policy Plans:

Currently, the European Union (EU) is making considerable efforts toward new policies for the ethical governance of autonomous agents development. This contribution elaborates on the way ethics is implemented in EU robotics and AI governance and how this constitutes an important new development for robotics and HRI as research fields. The main point in this regard is that the focus on (public) trust in robots and the increasing role of ethics is giving rise to a stronger relationship between policy-making efforts and robotics research. To develop this point, I first provide an overview of the EU’s policy-making activities in the area of robotics in recent years. Based on this overview, I explore the ramifications of the focus on ethics while distinguishing different ideas and concepts that constitute how those themes in EU policy-making discourse are defined.