Robots are featuring more and more in our daily lives.
Imagination is perhaps the only limit to what robots will be able to do in the future.
For example, what happens if a bionic arm is involvedin a driving accident?
Robot accidents are becoming a concern for two reasons.
Second, were getting better at building more complex robots.
When a robot is more complex, its more difficult to understand why something went wrong.
Most robots run on various forms ofartificial intelligence(AI).
AIs are capable of making human-like decisions (though they may make objectively good or bad ones).
These decisions can be any number of things, from identifying an object to interpreting speech.
AIs are trained to make these decisions for the robot based on information from vast datasets.
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As an example, consider the robot vacuum.
It could be designed so that whenever it bumps off a surface it redirects in a random direction.
In both cases, the AI is taking in information and making a decision around it.
The more complex things a robot is capable of, the more types of information it has to interpret.
Accidents happen
As with any product, things can and do go wrong with robots.
Sometimes this is an internal issue, such as the robot not recognising a voice command.
Sometimes its external the robots sensor was damaged.
Why is robot accident investigation different to that of human accidents?
Notably, robots dont have motives.
In the example of the bionic arm, was it a miscommunication between the user and the hand?
Did the robot confuse multiple signals?
Or did it have trouble interpreting the users speech?
This information is incredibly valuable not only in understanding incidents, but in preventing them from happening again.
This can be voice, visual, or evenbrainwave activity.
We are testing the ethical black box on a variety of robots in both laboratory and simulated accident conditions.
The aim is that the ethical black box will become standard in robots of all makes and applications.
The investigation process offers the chance to ensure that the same errors dont happen twice.
