Editorial: Responsible Robotics

Martim Brandão, Masoumeh Mansouri, Martin Magnusson

Abstract: problems with AI will also be present in robotics, the physical nature of robotics raises new aspects of the social and ethical nature of these technologies, and raises new issues altogether. For example: models that are considerably less accurate on certain groups of people can lead to physical safety differentials Brandao (2019), the visual appearance of robots can affect people's moral evaluation of robot decisions Malle and Scheutz (2016), and applications in care lead to new ethical issues van Wynsberghe (2021); Kubota et al. (2021). Robotics also raises issues of physical security Brundage et al. (2018), the nature of war Sparrow (2007), surveillance and privacy Calo (2011); Eick and Antón (2020); Luo et al. (2020), deception Danaher (2020); Hartzog (2014), impact on work Smids et al. (2020), etc. The robotics community has been discussing ethics for long 2 . Recent workshops have also started bringing attention to philosophical problems in robotics 3 and issues such as bias 4 and fairness and transparency 5 . These efforts share a common goal of developing robotics technologies responsibly-they are part of "Responsible Robotics" or "Trustworthy Robotics".A similar effort on "Critical Robotics" Serholt et al. (2021) has focused on questioning current practices in robotics research. These range from how older adults are represented in HRI Burema (2021) and ethical issues in education robots Serholt et al. (2017), to normative dimensions of speech used by researchers B...