Responsible Robotics: Identifying and Addressing Issues of Ethics, Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Privacy and Employment

Intelligent robots come with promises of great value to society but can also be seen as threats in terms of job loss, increased social inequalities, transparency and privacy, bias in training or design, excessive delegation of decision-making, etc. The “Against” series of workshops at ICRA 2019 and 2020 (against-19 and against-20) have put forth a diversity of related viewpoints from experts in robotics and AI, but also human-computer interaction, philosophy, economics, gender studies and social science. We propose a Research Topic on “Responsible Robotics: Identifying and Addressing Issues of Ethics, Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Privacy and Employment”.

The mission of the Research Topic is twofold:
1. To identify ethical, legal, societal, and acceptability issues within robotics and automation.
2. To propose social, political, and technical solutions to these issues.

We aim to gather excellent research on both fronts, which entails a multidisciplinary scope.
As a result, the topics relevant to this Research Topic include, but are not limited to:
• Responsible robotics
• Ethical use of robotics
• Transparency and explainability in robotics and AI
• Robots and jobs
• Gender aspects of robotics
• Privacy in robotics
• Fairness and discrimination in robotics
• Responsibilities and rights with regards to robotics and AI
• Social acceptability of robotics
• Moral competence of autonomous agents
• Governance of robotics and automation

We anticipate original paper submissions on the above topics from several people who have presented and participated in the against-19 and against-20 workshops, as well as a number of authors with a proven research interest in ethical problems and solutions within robotics and AI.