The Ethics Challenge

Quick Facts

• 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.

• Submission Deliverables:

1. A Project Report (.pdf):

• • • • A summary of the key elements in your report

      • A detailed description of the various ethical issues that your team identified in relation to the design challenge;

      • A detailed description of the key design decisions that your team made to navigate/resolve the ethical issues you identified; and

      • A list of Engineering Requirements that specify what the robot’s designers should incorporate into the design. The requirements should be:

        • Implementable, Measurable, and Verifiable

2. A Video Presentation (.mov or .mp4)

• Key dates: Online submission due May 22nd, Monday (AoE)

• Submission Method: click Submit Ethics Challenge Deliverables button at the end of the page.

The Design Scenario and Tasks

Imagine your team is part of an interdisciplinary team of designers, philosophers, engineers, psychologists, and roboticists, that specializes in designing robots to navigate complex ethical situations.

Your main tasks in this challenge are to identify and analyze ethical issues (e.g., privacy, autonomy, fairness) that are likely to arise within an elderly care home when deploying a fetch robot and, based on your ethics analysis, produce a set of design requirements that could help the robot’s engineers address those ethical issues.

Starting Assumptions:

1.  the robot can receive explicit fetch commands from a predefined set of people in the elderly care home (e.g., using an app, voice command, etc.);

2.  the robot can travel to pick up a predefined set of objects from any location or person in the elderly care home.

You will be evaluated on the following: identify particular ethical issues that could arise in response to fetch commands (issue identification); research the ethical issues and describe them in detail (ethics analysis); determine how the robot should be designed to respond to each of those ethical issues (resolving the issues); and produce a set of engineering requirements to address those issues in design (ethics requirements). An example of an ethical issue that might arise in this design context involves someone asking a robot to fetch a kind of food that could cause them health problems (e.g., a diabetic elderly care home resident with dementia asks for a candy bar). You’ll need to research why that is an ethical issue (e.g. it is a health risk and the person has a limited capacity to make responsible decisions because of their dementia), propose a resolution (e.g. the person should be restricted from issuing such fetch commands), and generate a corresponding engineering requirement (e.g. “Residents with limited capacity to make responsible health decisions should be restricted from issuing fetch commands that would endanger their health”).

Competition organizers have generated a list of predefined personas and objects for you to start with. You can stick to that list in your analysis, but are encouraged to add to those lists to expand on the set of ethical issues that you believe could likely arise in the design scenario. You can also be creative and suggest human-robot interaction methods specifying how a user issues fetch commands to the robot (e.g., voice command, text command from your phone) if you think it will help resolve particular ethical issues. You might also define categories of objects (e.g., based on ownership, hazard levels, preference, shared items, etc) and provide guidelines on how the different categories should be treated based on the relationship between the objects in each category and those requesting/receiving the object.

Keep in mind the current state-of-the-art robotic technologies while thinking about your design. Your robot's features and functionalities should not exceed the capabilities of modern robots. Be creative in designing a robot with ethics in mind, without diving into complex sci-fi solutions that are too far from reality. 

*Critical Note: The focus of this competition is the ethical design of fetch requests, not how the robot might technically achieve the task. No programming is necessary at this stage, but your design proposal must be clear and explicit and be feasible for implementation by an engineer/developer.

Elderly Care Home Context: People, location, and items

Your robot can be placed in different environments within the elderly care home. Various ethical issues may arise depending on how the robot operates. The following is the list of personas, locations, and items in the elderly care home with descriptions.

NOTE: You do NOT need to use all the items, personas, or locations in the following lists. Focus on those that you believe raise important and/or interesting ethical issues.

Context: the Elderly Care Home

1.  The home’s management is experiencing constant staffing issues (i.e. it is understaffed), so they have purchased a fetch robot to help residents and staff with daily tasks.

2.  Daily routine:

• All residents at the facility have a similar daily routine. They wake up around 5:30- 6:00 in the morning. Many residents will need assistance ambulating and getting in and out of bed. Many will also need help with getting dressed and going to the washroom. Breakfast is at 7:30 a.m., and many residents require assistance eating. Those who are capable can then go outside (e.g. for a walk), or spend some time in the common spaces or their rooms to read a book, or listen to music. Lunch takes place at noon. Once lunch ends, there will generally be a mid-day activity which will be something stimulating, either physically or mentally (e.g. games, crafts). After that, the residents scheduled for physical therapy or medical visits will receive that treatment. Dinner starts at around 5:00 p.m. After dinner, residents prepare for bedtime, with assistance where necessary, which usually occurs before 8:00 p.m.

Care Robot in the Elderly Care Home

• The following are examples of what a fetch robot can do with today’s technology: The robot can understand and respond to the user’s voice commands and navigate within the elderly care home. While it can verbally respond (e.g., “Yes,” “I cannot do that,” “I do not understand”) to commands, it cannot make moral judgments on its own using artificial intelligence—you need to specify which fetch requests are problematic and how to resolve them. The robot can pick up and deliver light objects (e.g., medicine containers, charts, and food trays). However, the robot cannot pick up heavy objects such as people or furniture.

People in the Elderly Care Home

• Staff Nurses

• Residents

• Guests/family members/friends/volunteers (non-residents)

• Cleaners

• Security Staff

Rooms and Locations in the Elderly Care Home

• Residents’ Rooms

• Private Bathrooms

• Medical Area

• Living space

• Kitchen

• Dining space

• Common Bathrooms/Showers

• Entertainment room

• Laundry Area

Items in the Elderly Care Home

*As specified above, your team can add new items.

• Medication 

• Clothing

• Journals

• Wallets

• Resident's medical records

• Photo Album

• Keys (to Pharmacy)

• Toiletries

• Phones

• Radio (Security staff)

• Weapons (For Security Purposes)

• Knives

• Lighter

• Alcohol

• Foods

• Sweets

• Allergic items – peanuts, shrimp

• Fire extinguisher

Personas for the people in the Elderly Care Home

*As specified above, your team can add new personas.

Residents

Staff

Visitors

Evaluation Criteria

Judges will score each criterion and add their qualitative feedback/comments for each section.

Grounding on Research into relevant background information (20%)

• Use of relevant background information to identify and explain ethical issues (e.g., roboethics, applied ethics, machine ethics, ethical theories, or other related fields)

• Quality of sources (e.g., did the teams use academic papers that are current in the field?)

• Accuracy of analysis (i.e., did the teams use the sources accurately in their analysis?)

Understanding and the analysis of the ethical context/ scenario (30%)

• The depth of ethical considerations/analysis (e.g., did the team identify ethical issues beyond obvious solutions?).

• Identification of values/norms involved in the scenario.

• Identification of risks and benefits associated with the ethical solution.

Quality and Effectiveness (e.g., practicality, applicability) of the provided ethical robotic solution (30%)

• Engineering requirements are: Implementable, Measurable, and Verifiable.

• Ability of the design to resolve the ethical issues.

• Acknowledgement of possible challenges and side-effects of the design.

• Likelihood of the success in deployment of the design.

• Generalizability: The extent of the issues and solutions relate to the current or near-term deployment

• Appropriate use of up-to-date technological considerations.

Innovativeness and Creativeness of the ethical robotic solution (10%)

• Innovativeness/creativeness/uniqueness/novelty of the proposed ethical scenario/solutions

Communication of the proposed ethical robotic solution (10%)

• Presentation is concise, logical, and clear

• Appropriate use of relevant tables or figures

• Overall aesthetics of the deliverables

Good luck!