Assistive Robotics: AI Challenges and Ethics Education Initiatives

Robotics research has evolved a lot in the last 20 years, and the focus has shifted from the mechanics, kinematics and control of industrial manipulators to the capacities of perception, learning and interaction with people of so-called social robots. This poses a series of research challenges. The way to instruct these robots must be easy and intuitive so that non-expert users can teach them the tasks they have to do, for example, through demonstrations. Not being caged like their predecessors in factories, they must be intrinsically safe to people, a critical aspect of considerable technical difficulty, especially when the interaction requires physical contact. They should be able to perceive and manipulate the deformable objects that abound in domestic and healthcare environments, which involves great complexity given the infinite dimensionality of their shape spaces compared to the six degrees of freedom that characterize the pose of a rigid object. They must also be tolerant to noisy perceptions and inaccurate actions and be endowed with a strong learning ability and adaptability to dynamic environments. Finally, the behaviour of these robots should not be limited to a fixed sequence of actions, but must be goal-driven and collaborative with people.

These six challenges can be pairwise grouped and translated into three U-turns of research in Artificial Intelligence. 1) Usability turn: from exhaustive programming taking into account all situations and rigid control schemes, to learning from demonstrations and compliant control. 2) Uncertainty turn: from high-resolution perception and accurate manipulation planning to task-oriented perception and probabilistic re-planning adapted to context and user. 3) Understanding turn: from building associations to attaching semantics to perceptions of objects and situations as well as reasoning about functionalities and goals.

In the keynote, these U-turns will be illustrated through results from the project CLOTHILDE [1], which deals with the robotic handling of garments in the healthcare and logistics contexts, an application that requires addressing the six technical challenges mentioned above.

This shift from industrial to social robotics poses also ethical and social defies, which have led to a necessary confluence with the humanities. In addition to establishing regulations and standards, numerous educational initiatives have emerged, where science fiction often plays a prominent role by highlighting the pros and cons of possible future scenarios. In the context of university education, MIT Press has recently published my novel [2], along with ancillary materials to teach a course on “Ethics in Social Robotics and Artificial Intelligence”. The goal is to provide useful guidelines for students and professionals (robot designers, manufacturers, and programmers), as well as for end users and the general public.

REFERENCES
[1] CLOTHILDE Project (2018-22): https://clothilde.iri.upc.edu/
[2] C. Torras: The Vestigial Heart. A Novel of the Robot Age. MIT Press, 2018. http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vestigial-heart