The EU-backed ?1.5 million (?1.3 million) RoboLaw Project brings together a team of roboticists, lawyers and philosophers to work together to come up with proposals for the laws and regulations necessary to manage emerging robotics technologies
It is easy to be wowed by the self-driving cars showcased by Google and now Oxford University, but Dr Pericle Salvini's job is to try to make us think about the ethical and legal implications of such robotic technology. After all, if an autonomous vehicle crashed, who would be responsible? The driver? Google? The car itself?
"Robots are no longer science fiction, as they have left the factory and are arriving in our homes," says Salvini from the BioRobotics Institute at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (SSSA) in Pisa, Italy. And Asimov's Three Laws simply aren't sufficient.
As part of the unique EU-backed ?1.5 million RoboLaw Project, Salvini is managing a team of roboticists, lawyers and philosophers (yes, philosophers) from a consortium of European universities, who are working hard to come up with proposals for the laws and regulations necessary to manage emerging robotics technologies in Europe in time to present them to European Commission a year from now. The consortium comprises the University of Tilburg (the Netherlands), the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Reading and the SSSA.
RoboLaw, says Dr Andrea Bertolini of the Law Faculty at SSSA, will address questions such as, "Is the Google car an object that is not much different from a fridge or a word processor or is it more like a pet which the owner is responsible for? Perhaps it's more a parent-child relationship in which the parent still has some liability for his child's action?
"It can be hard to decide who is responsible and that's the gap the project is trying to fill in order to guarantee everyone's security and safety even if they are not in the car," adds Salvini.
While Joseph Engelberger, one of the fathers of robotics, was happy to admit that "I can't define a robot, but I know one when I see one", the RoboLaw project decided at the beginning to narrow this down a bit by looking at a wide range of "things" at home, from a robot arm to "softbots", and hybrid bionic systems such as hand prostheses.
The list, says Salvini, takes into account autonomous robots, including neurobiotics -- robots controlled via a brain-computer interface -- and service robots that operate in the home, cities and other public roles.
The next task of the project was to do phased research to identify what existing regulations apply to robotic technology, how the consequences vary from country to country, and what is happening in other disciplines. The result was a series of case studies which the roboticists, lawyers and philosophers explored to find possible solutions to future problems.
Now with a year to go they are at last coming to conclusions -- even if these are confidential until they've been shown to the European Commission.
While some roboticists may be worried about state regulation, Salvini's belief in the project's importance stems from his DustBot project, whose goal was to build an autonomous robot to collect the garbage and which was tested in a small town near Pisa.
"We designed, developed and deployed it for two months in a real small Italian town and quickly realised that, from the insurance companies to the town hall and local people, no one knew how to deal with it.
"These are exactly the kind of problems that roboticists will struggle with, as while they need to test their robots outside of the laboratory they are not always good at dealing with the social and legal environment."
For Bertolini one of the big issues was privacy: "[Robots] will be in our homes and in order to function they have to collect data on who we are and what we do."
Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/18/robolaw
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