A simulated real-world upper-body exoskeleton accident and investigation

This paper describes the enactment of a simulated (mock) accident involving an upper-body exoskeleton and its investigation. The accident scenario is enacted by role-playing volunteers, one of whom is wearing the exoskeleton. Following the mock accident, investigators – also volunteers – interview both the subject of the accident and relevant witnesses. The investigators then consider the witness testimony alongside robot data logged by the ethical black box, in order to address the three key questions: what happened?, why did it happen?, and how can we make changes to prevent the accident happening again? This simulated accident scenario is one of a series we have run as part of the RoboTIPS project, with the overall aim of developing and testing both processes and technologies to support social robot accident investigation

Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare

Chemotaxis Based Virtual Fence for Swarm Robots in Unbounded Environments

This paper presents a novel swarm robotics application of chemotaxis behaviour observed in microorganisms. This approach was used to cause exploration robots to return to a work area around the swarm’s nest within a boundless environment. We investigate the performance of our algorithm through extensive simulation studies and hardware validation. Results show that the chemotaxis approach is effective for keeping the swarm close to both stationary and moving nests. Performance comparison of these results with the unrealistic case where a boundary wall was used to keep the swarm within a target search area showed that our chemotaxis approach produced competitive results

Human-robot relationships and the development of responsible social robots

The contemporary development of social robots has been accompanied by concerns over their capacity to cause harm to humans. Our RoboTIPS study sets out to design and trial an innovative design feature that will advance the safe operation of social robots and foster societal trust. The Ethical Black Box (EBB) collects data about a robot's actions in real time and in context; when an incident occurs, this data can be used within a wider investigation process to determine what went wrong and prevent similar adverse events. In this paper we draw on Lucy Suchman's groundbreaking work on human-machine relationships to elucidate the goals, practices and potential impact of our study. We align with Suchman's positioning of safety as an accomplishment of situated action and draw on her analysis to describe the actions of the EBB-enhanced social robot as contingent on context and the robot's status as a social agent. We also describe shared priorities in our methodological approaches. We close with observations on how participatory design and an ethnomethodologically-informed stance towards data collection and analysis can contribute to the field of responsible innovation (RI), which seeks to ensure that innovations are undertaken in the public interest and provide societal value

Towards Exogenous Fault Detection in Swarm Robotic Systems

It has long been assumed that swarm systems are robust, in the sense that the failure of individual robots will have little detrimental effect on a swarm's overall collective behaviour. However, Bjerknes and Winfield [1] have recently shown that this is not always the case, particularly in the event of partial failures (such as motor failure). The reliability modelling in [1] shows that overall system reliability rapidly decreases with swarm size, therefore this is a problem that cannot simply be solved by adding more robots to the swarm. Instead, future large-scale swarm systems will need an active approach to dealing with failed individuals if they are to achieve a high level of fault tolerance.</p

Human-robot relationships and the development of responsible social robots

The contemporary development of social robots has been accompanied by concerns over their capacity to cause harm to humans. Our RoboTIPS study sets out to design and trial an innovative design feature that will advance the safe operation of social robots and foster societal trust. The Ethical Black Box (EBB) collects data about a robot's actions in real time and in context; when an incident occurs, this data can be used within a wider investigation process to determine what went wrong and prevent similar adverse events. In this paper we draw on Lucy Suchman's groundbreaking work on human-machine relationships to elucidate the goals, practices and potential impact of our study. We align with Suchman's positioning of safety as an accomplishment of situated action and draw on her analysis to describe the actions of the EBB-enhanced social robot as contingent on context and the robot's status as a social agent. We also describe shared priorities in our methodological approaches. We close with observations on how participatory design and an ethnomethodologically-informed stance towards data collection and analysis can contribute to the field of responsible innovation (RI), which seeks to ensure that innovations are undertaken in the public interest and provide societal value

Robot accident investigation: a case study in responsible robotics

Robot accidents are inevitable. Although rare, they have been happening since assembly line robots were first introduced in the 1960s. But a new generation of social robots is now becoming commonplace. Equipped with sophisticated embedded artificial intelligence (AI), social robots might be deployed as care robots to assist elderly or disabled people to live independently. Smart robot toys offer a compelling interactive play experience for children, and increasingly capable autonomous vehicles (AVs) offer the promise of hands-free personal transport and fully autonomous taxis. Unlike industrial robots, which are deployed in safety cages, social robots are designed to operate in human environments and interact closely with humans; the likelihood of robot accidents is therefore much greater for social robots than industrial robots. This chapter sets out a draft framework for social robot accident investigation, a framework that proposes both the technology and processes that would allow social robot accidents to be investigated with no less rigour than we expect of air or rail accident investigations. The chapter also places accident investigation within the practice of responsible robotics and makes the case that social robotics without accident investigation would be no less irresponsible than aviation without air accident investigation