Overview

Robotic systems are frequently employed to solve complex tasks in human environments. However, our ability to engineer capable robots has outstripped our ability to understand, predict, and mitigate potential ethical consequences of their deployment. As businesses and governments consider robotic solutions to construction, logistics, security, surveillance, and other challenges, the importance of ensuring and verifying that the robotic systems we develop behave in an ethical manner increases. Shared communication, methods for evaluation, technical innovation, and a clearer inventory of current and future shortcomings with respect to ethical robotic systems are of central importance, alongside better understanding of complications faced during deployments as robots live and interact with humans, common applications of different ethical robotic tools in different scenarios, and identification of common oversight or implicit assumptions in practice. The current field of robot ethics faces many unique challenges in communication, scoping, and problem selection, in addition to the more easily recognizable engineering challenges of building and evaluating ethical robotic systems. In light of these challenges, we welcome papers on topics including but not limited to the following areas:

• Value alignment in robotic systems
• Cultural, political, and societal impacts of robotics
• Methods for analyzing the ethical implications of autonomous systems
• Moral reasoning in autonomous systems
• Safe, transparent, explainable, or interpretable AI systems
• Ethical compliance in robotic systems
• Ethically sensitive design and implementation of autonomous systems
• Human-compatible or beneficial AI systems
• Law, regulation, and governance of robotics
• Challenges of building and evaluating ethical robotic systems
• Ethical models and algorithms in robotic systems
• Impacts of robotics on vulnerable groups
• Novel data sets or test suites for ethical robotic systems

Contact: ers.workshop@gmail.com

Submissions

We encourage a range of submission types to facilitate broad participation:

• Technical papers (up to 6 pages). These papers present new methods for ensuring or verifying certain behaviors or mitigating harms that represent state-of-the-art methods in some aspect.
• Evaluation papers (up to 6 pages). These papers are focused specifically on evaluation resources (data sets, environments, benchmarks, etc.) for robot ethics, comparative studies examining the applicability of different approaches for different problems, or empirical studies on the ethical issues of how robots and humans interact in deployment settings.
• Survey papers (up to 8 pages). These papers present studies examining existing research at scale and might be a solid foundation for a more comprehensive article.
• Position papers (up to 4 pages). These papers argue for the importance of certain techniques, questions, evaluation paradigms, design philosophies, etc. in future robot ethics research.

Details: Please use the IROS latex format. All papers may have an unlimited number of references. The workshop is non-archival. We encourage submission of previously published work, or the simultaneous submission of work to ERS and other venues if authors believe their work is relevant.

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: Sunday, September 22, 2024, 11:59pm AoE
• Acceptance Notification: Tuesday, October 1, 2024
• Camera-Ready Submission: Tuesday, October 8, 2024, 11:59pm AoE

Location Details

Meeting Room 19 is also labeled Capital Suite 7. It is on the second level of the convention center above the main hall.

• In-Person Attendees: Meeting Room 19 (Capital Suite 7)
• Virtual Attendees: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/8332583325

• 11:05 – 11:15 Towards Hierarchical Planning with Social Norms and Ethical Considerations
  Tammy Zhong, David Rajaratnam, Yang Song, Maurice Pagnucco
• 11:15 – 11:25 Risk-based Socially-Compliant Behavior Planning for Autonomous Driving
  Yiwei Lyu, Wenhao Luo, John Dolan
• 11:25 – 11:35 The Ethical Treatment of Social Robots
  Jessica Barfield
• 11:35 – 11:45 Towards Transparent Ethical AI: A Roadmap for Trustworthy Robotic Systems
  Ahmad Farooq, Kamran Iqbal