How to make ethical robots

In the future according to robotics researchers, robots will likely fight our wars, care for our elderly, babysit our children, and serve and entertain us in a wide variety of situations. But as robotic development continues to grow, one subfield of robotics research is lagging behind other areas: roboethics, or ensuring that robot behavior adheres to certain moral standards. In a new paper that provides a broad overview of ethical behavior in robots, researchers emphasize the importance of being proactive rather than reactive in this area. The authors, Ronald Craig Arkin, Regents' Professor and Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, along with researchers Patrick Ulam and Alan R. Wagner, have published their overview of moral decision making in autonomous systems in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE. "Probably at the highest level, the most important message is that people need to start to think and talk about these issues, and some are more pressing than others," Arkin told PhysOrg.com.