Ethical Robots and Robot Ethics

As the field of robotics progresses, robots increasingly share the public and private space with humans. Think of self-driving cars on the roads, carebots in elderly homes and Rumba and its next iterations taking care of household chores. When robots co-exist with humans they need to conform to social norms, first and foremost those norms relating to safety. When you visit someone in their home, you don't take the shortest route to the living room if this means stepping on their pet. And neither should a robot.

We are expressions of code. And not even that much of code either. The genome – our complete set of DNA – fits on a CD-ROM. We are less complicated than the Windows 10 operating system.

One of the threats of human-level artificial intelligence (or beyond) is it ending up in the hands of a few, which will give them great power over the rest of humanity. OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company promises to open source its results.

Founder of Unimation, the world’s first industrial robotics manufacturer, Joseph F. Engelberger died the first of December 2015 at the respected age of 90. Engelberger was considered the father of robotics by the automation industry.

If you’ve paid attention to just about any media outlet lately, you’ve likely seen the dire warnings about the threat to humanity posed by artificial intelligence that have been issued by the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. However, according to four artificial intelligence researchers that I’ve interviewed in the past three months, while AI’s risks may be cause for concern, shaping our AI future may have more to do with directing current trends, rather than overtly preventin...

Much effort is going into teaching robots natural language for easy human-robot interaction. When robots work side by side with humans they must understand when they're given a certain task. But robots must also learn to refuse harmful or inappropriate orders. Researchers from Tufts University are teaching Nao robots how to reject directives given by humans while staying polite. Gordon Briggs and Matthias Scheutz of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory, Tufts University have developed a mech...

OpenBCI, the open source Brain Computer Interface platform, started in 2013 to make biosensing available to makers, researchers and biohackers. Now the OpenBCI team has launched a new crowdfunding campaign to further lower the barrier to entry with an even cheaper OpenBCI platform and a new 3D printed headset. The development of brain wave capturing and reading should not be in the hands of corporations and well-funded research institutes alone, said Joel Murphy and Conor Russomanno when they r...

This design is useful for speedy mobile robots and provides fast, contactless detection of obstacles ahead. Not only can it detect the obstacle, it also indicates in which direction it is. The project has a liberal sprinkling of both hardware and software sorcery.

Texas Instruments (TI) has introduced a family of three new highly integrated brushed DC motor controllers. The DRV8871 is a brushed-DC motor driver with built-in current sense and H-bridge driver circuit using...

Intersil has introduced the ISL29501 time-of-flight (ToF) signal processing IC that provides an object detection and distance measurement solution when combined with an external emitter (LED or laser) and photodiode. Intersil claim the technology...