TY - GEN

T1 - Towards ethical robots

T2 - Revisiting Braitenberg's vehicles

AU - Headleand, C. J.

AU - Cenydd, L. ap

AU - Teahan, W.

PY - 2016/9/1

Y1 - 2016/9/1

N2 - The development of software and machines capable of making ethical judgements is a topic of great interest with both the research communities and the public. Debates over the possibility and practicality of such systems have only intensified with the increased use of robotics in the military arena and the ubiquity of AI in commercial products. Modern innovations, such as the driverless car, will likely make artificial ethical agents a legal necessity. As a research field, it has received relatively little attention compared to other, more traditional, AI problems. In this paper, we propose a bottom-up reactive system that provides one possible solution. We will begin by describing the motivation to this work: the development of artificial ethical agents could both mitigate some fears about the future of autonomous AI, and providing insight into human moral reasoning. We then explore the related work, including the current attempts at simulating ethics. We describe our novel approach to ethical simulation, Vessels; a Braitenberg Vehicle inspired reactive agent approach. We, then, demonstrate how Vessels can be configured to simulate both Egoism and Altruism, comparing our simulations to the normative theory

AB - The development of software and machines capable of making ethical judgements is a topic of great interest with both the research communities and the public. Debates over the possibility and practicality of such systems have only intensified with the increased use of robotics in the military arena and the ubiquity of AI in commercial products. Modern innovations, such as the driverless car, will likely make artificial ethical agents a legal necessity. As a research field, it has received relatively little attention compared to other, more traditional, AI problems. In this paper, we propose a bottom-up reactive system that provides one possible solution. We will begin by describing the motivation to this work: the development of artificial ethical agents could both mitigate some fears about the future of autonomous AI, and providing insight into human moral reasoning. We then explore the related work, including the current attempts at simulating ethics. We describe our novel approach to ethical simulation, Vessels; a Braitenberg Vehicle inspired reactive agent approach. We, then, demonstrate how Vessels can be configured to simulate both Egoism and Altruism, comparing our simulations to the normative theory

KW - Actuators

KW - Artificial intelligence

KW - Cognition

KW - Ethics

KW - Robots

KW - Sensors

KW - Vehicles

KW - Braitenberg Vehicles

KW - Simulated Ethics

U2 - 10.1109/SAI.2016.7556023

DO - 10.1109/SAI.2016.7556023

M3 - Conference contribution

SP - 469

EP - 477

BT - 2016 SAI Computing Conference (SAI)

ER -