Complex systems, such as small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) swarms dispatched for emergency response, often require dynamic reconfiguration at runtime under the supervision of human operators. This introduces human-on-the-loop requirements, where evolving needs shape ongoing system functionality and behaviors. While traditional personas support upfront, static requirements elicitation, we propose a persona-based advocate framework for runtime requirements engineering to provide ethically informed, safety-driven, and regulatory-aware decision support. Our approach extends standard personas into event-driven personas. When triggered by events such as adverse environmental conditions, evolving mission state, or operational constraints, the framework updates the sUAS operator's view of the personas, ensuring relevance to current conditions. We create three key advocate personas, namely Safety Controller, Ethical Governor, and Regulatory Auditor, to manage trade-offs among risk, ethical considerations, and regulatory compliance. We perform a proof-of-concept validation in an emergency response scenario using sUAS, showing how our advocate personas provide context-aware guidance grounded in safety, regulatory, and ethical constraints. By evolving static, design-time personas into adaptive, event-driven advocates, the framework surfaces mission-critical runtime requirements in response to changing conditions. These requirements shape operator decisions in real time, aligning actions with the operational demands of the moment.

The common consensus is that robots designed to work alongside or serve humans must adhere to the ethical standards of their operational environment. To achieve this, several methods based on established ethical theories have been suggested. Nonetheless, numerous empirical studies show that the ethical requirements of the real world are very diverse and can change rapidly from region to region. This eliminates the idea of a universal robot that can fit into any ethical context. However, creating customised robots for each deployment, using existing techniques is challenging. This paper presents a way to overcome this challenge by introducing a virtue ethics inspired computational method that enables character-based tuning of robots to accommodate the specific ethical needs of an environment. Using a simulated elder-care environment, we illustrate how tuning can be used to change the behaviour of a robot that interacts with an elderly resident in an ambient-assisted environment. Further, we assess the robot's responses by consulting ethicists to identify potential shortcomings.

Most of the discussion around robots and ethics lately has been about whether autonomous cars will decide to run over the nearest kitten or a slightly farther away basket full of puppies. Whether or not robots can make ethical decisions when presented with novel situations is something that lots and lots of people are still working on, but it's much easier for robots to be ethical in situations where the rules are a little bit clearer, and also when there is very little chance of running over cute animals. At ICRA last month, researchers at Georgia Tech presented a paper on "an intervening ethical governor for a robot mediator in patient-caregiver relationship." The idea is that robots will become part of our daily lives, and they are much, much better than humans at paying close and careful attention to things, without getting distracted or bored, forever. So robots with an understanding of ethical issues would be able to observe interactions between patients and caregivers, and intervene when they notice that something's not going the way it should.

Machine ethics offers an alternative solution for artificial intelligence (AI) safety governance. In order to mitigate risks in human-robot interactions, robots will have to comply with humanity's ethical and legal norms, once they've merged into our daily life with highly autonomous capability. In terms of technical challenges, there are still many open questions in machine ethics. For example, what is deontic logic and how can it be used for improving AI safety? How do we fashion the knowledge representation for ethical robots? These are all significant questions for us to investigate. In this interview, we invite Prof. Ronald C. Arkin to share his insights on robot ethics, with a focus on its technical aspects.

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.

The dawn of the 21st century has been called the decade of the drone. Unmanned aerial vehicles, remotely operated by pilots in the United States, rain Hellfire missiles on suspected insurgents in South Asia and the Middle East. Now a small group of scholars is grappling with what some believe could be the next generation of weaponry: lethal autonomous robots. At the center of the debate is Ronald C. Arkin, a Georgia Tech professor who has hypothesized lethal weapons systems that are ethically superior to human soldiers on the battlefield. A professor of robotics and ethics, he has devised algorithms for an "ethical governor" that he says could one day guide an aerial drone or ground robot to either shoot or hold its fire in accordance with internationally agreed-upon rules of war. But some scholars have dismissed Mr. Arkin's ethical governor as "vaporware," arguing that current technology is nowhere near the level of complexity that would be needed for a military robotic system to make life-and-death ethical judgments.

It described as "fundamentally vague" Stephen Goose's ethical line in his Point side of the Point/Counterpoint debate "The Case for Banning Killer Robots" in the same issue. I encourage all ACM members to read or re-read them and consider if they themselves should be working on lethal autonomous weapons or even on any kind of weapon. Ronald Arkin's Counterpoint was optimistic regarding robots' ability to "... exceed human moral performance ...," writing that a ban on autonomous weapons "... ignores the moral imperative to use technology to reduce the atrocities and mistakes that human warfighters make." This analysis involved two main problems. First, Arkin tacitly assumed autonomous weapons will be used only by benevolent forces, and the "moral performance" of such weapons is incorruptible by those deploying them.