Human-Robot Systems Facing Ethical Conflicts: A Preliminary Experimental Protocol

This paper focuses on a preliminary experimental protocol that aims at assessing a robot operator’s behavior when the robot is equipped with what appears as moral decision capabilities. The protocol is derived from the trolley dilemma, a well-known decision making paradigm. Indeed the participants, acting as operators of simulated aerial robots via a computer screen, are faced to impersonal moral dilemmas, i.e. decide to crash a damaged robot on one of two inhabited areas, and to non-moral choices, i.e. decide to crash a damaged robot on one of two uninhabited areas. In each situation, the robot has a default crash behavior which is displayed to the participant who will have to decide whether to follow it or not. The participants are equipped with fNIRS and eye-tracking and answer a post-experimental questionnaire. As some of the behavioral and physiological results do not match the hypotheses we had set, we give the features of the further experiments that we are planning.