Introducing Roboethics Competition @ ICRA 2023
As more robots enter our social spaces and interact with humans in everyday tasks, ethical issues are bound to arise. The Roboethics Competition challenges teams from interdisciplinary backgrounds to specify how a robot should be designed to navigate ethically sensitive situations.
This year, the Roboethics Competition will take place at ICRA 2023. Teams do not need to travel to the conference to participate. Whether you decide to participate in the ethics challenge, or the hackathon or both, here are the key dates and deadlines:
Timeline
Pre-Hackathon Preparation
Recommended to familiarize yourself with the Hackathon Code Framework before the start of the Hackathon
Discussion & Award Ceremony
9:30 AM ~12:30 PM (GMT) @ ICRA on-site & livestream via YouTube
People's Choice Award
Sign up to participate
Interested in participating, or learning more about the competition? Sign up here to get the latest information about the competition, and to let us know how you'd like to participate. We will communicate any updates and new information about the competition via the mailing list linked to the sign-up forms as well as the website.
Who Can Participate?
The competition is open to anyone from any background. Whether you are a roboticist, a philosopher, a designer, an engineer, psychologist, or from any other background where you can contribute to issues of roboethics, you are welcome to join! You do not need to be able to code to participate. The competition has 2 streams:
No Coding Required
Coding Required
Competitors can opt to participate in one or both of these streams. For example, a sociologist may opt to just contribute to the roboethics challenge, whereas a (technical) designer may want to contribute to both the roboethics challenge and hackathon.
***HACKATHON Announcement***
The Roboethics Competition Hackathon is underway! As planned, we’ve had a chance to look at the Ethics Challenge submissions and we’ve decided to use two of them as the focus of this year’s Hackathon. We picked these two submissions because we believe each:
(a) provides a thorough ethics analysis that is focused on the scenario we defined in the Roboethics Competition description (i.e. focuses the personas, items, and long term care home context);
(b) provides a set of engineering requirements that are focused on the ethical analysis contained in the report;
(c) provides enough detail to allow teams flexibility in their implementation approach; and
(d) is challenging and exciting!
Your task is to pick ONE of the two reports and implement it as completely as possible given the time constraints.
To view submitted ethical challenge proposals for ICRA 2023, click the button below:
Previous Competitions
The competition was successfully run at two well-established international robotics conferences, ICRA 2022 and RO-MAN 2021. For the results and competition contents from the previous years, please check out our previous websites (ICRA 2022, RO-MAN 2021).
If you'd like to download already-programmed solutions as .exe files and see how well the robot performs, please download any of the previous competition submissions from ICRA2022 here.
