Call for Participants

Are you interested in designing robots with ethics in mind?

We are calling all roboticists, philosophers, designers, and engineers!

Join the 2023 ICRA Roboethics Competition to contribute to the frontier of robot ethics research and for a chance to win cash prizes! 

You don’t need to be a roboticist/programmer or travel to ICRA 2023 to participate.

Why is this important?

Robot ethics poses some of the greatest challenges in interactive robot designs. In many cases, humans navigate ethical and social situations with ease, whereas it may be much more difficult for a robot. For example, if a diabetic elderly care home resident with dementia asks the robot for a candy bar, what should the robot be programmed to do? This competition will challenge you to think about ethics as concrete design considerations to be implemented as interactive robot behaviors.

What you'll do as a participant (or participating team):

Participating teams can choose to participate in one or both (ethics challenge & hackathon) components of the competition.

• Ethics Challenge (Online submission): Before ICRA 2023: participants will be presented with a scenario involving a care robot that must be programmed to interact with residents inside an elderly care home while considering possible ethical challenges. Participants will be asked to submit a written project report (no code/programming needed) outlining how a robot should be programmed to behave, and a video presentation. The goal of the report is to convince a technical audience to implement the proposed behavior during ICRA. Details of the Ethics Challenge to be tackled are available here.

• Hackathon (hybrid): Anyone with programming skills is invited to choose one of the submitted ethics challenge reports and create a software implementation based on the robot behavior outlined in that report. The hackathon will take place from May 24th to May 31st, with the goal of delivering a prototype. Details of the hackathon are available here.

Timeline

• April 28th- May 22nd: Ethics Challenge submissions deadline

• April 28th – May 22nd: Pre-Hackathon Preparation

• May 24th- May 31st : Voting for the People’s Choice (of Ethics Challenge) Award

• May 24th – May 31st: Hackathon (on-site at ICRA and online)

• June 1st: Discussion and Award Ceremony (on-site at ICRA and online)

How will we communicate?

• Once you've signed up with your interest to participate, we will keep you posted via email as well as our competition website.

• For any questions, please contact us at roboethicscomp@gmail.com

Call for Hackathon Coders

The Hackathon will take place between May 24th – May 31st (but you’re encouraged to familiarize yourself with the Hackathon Code Framework available under the Hackathon page) in-person at ICRA 2023 (London, UK) and online. 

The context for the hackathon is available on our website already so that you can be better prepared. Software libraries/competition API are also available on the Hackathon page. Processing is the environment we will be using to evaluate your submissions.

Minimum criteria for valid submission

• The submitted code should run in the Processing environment.

• The submitted prototype should demonstrate a minimum of 10 valid object retrieval requests in order to be considered a complete and valid submission.

• A README file or a short description should be included in the submission with at least the following information:

  • • Participant name, affiliation, and contact information for acknowledgment purposes.

    • Acknowledge the Design Proposal submission that has been chosen to be implemented.

    • Instructions for running the code or using the demo (especially any particular features implemented in the code that require special instructions).

How the submissions will be evaluated

All valid submissions will be evaluated based on their generalizability (30%), correspondence (30%), ingenuity (30%), and demo quality (10%). A more detailed description of what each of the criteria means is outlined here.

Prizes

Three cash prizes will be awarded to the three top winners!

1st place winner will be awarded a $1000 CAD cash prize, 2nd place winner will be awarded a $500 CAD cash prize, and the 3rd place winner will be awarded a $250 CAD cash prize!

These prizes will be awarded based on the judges’ evaluation of the submissions.

Registration & Participation

• We have free in-person ICRA (competition-only) access.

  • • • To give us a better idea of the number of coders interested in participating in our event, please fill out this form. If you'd like to participate in-person, please indicate it in the registration form and we will send you a follow-up email.

• You can participate as an individual or as a team, online and in-person.

• You can produce multiple submissions to increase your chances of winning.