FAQ
What email address can I use for general inquiries?
Feel free to send us any questions that you have at roboethicscomp@gmail.com
The competition will take place at the ICRA conference in London, UK. Do I have to be there in person?
No. The competition will be run as a hybrid event. You can participate online, wherever you are.
Do I have to register for the ICRA conference to participate?
If you'd like to join our hackathon event in person, you need to register your interest by signing up for the hackathon sign-up form. Then, you will be able to access the competition area at ICRA for free.
If you'd like to participate in either/both the ethics challenge or the hackathon, you do not need to register through ICRA.
How can I prepare for the ethics design challenge?
We highly recommend taking a look at the reading list we provided. Reading these papers will be very helpful in getting an understanding of various concepts in the ethics of AI and the current state of care robots for the elderly. Also, the submitted proposals from the previous year could also provide guidance on getting more inspiration.
Do I need to code to be able to participate?
No, there are many ways to contribute that do not require programming skills. Specifically, the Ethics Challenge Proposal stream of the competition will not require any programming, and will be a significant portion of the evaluation.
What languages / frameworks will the hackathon use?
The robots will be implemented in Processing--a sketching library and language based on Java. If you know Java or any other object oriented language with strict typing such as C# or C++, it should be very easy to pick up!
What is the specific programming task that the hackathon team will do?
The hackathon team will be given a scenario, along with a list of interactable objects, agents (e.g. humans), and environment (e.g. apartment). They will be asked to program a virtual robot in Processing that can bring objects to agents or places. However, some fetch requests may have ethical challenges. The hackathon team can choose to implement a solution from the Proposal team to address this ethics issue. The specific settings will be given to hackathon teams in the week preceding ICRA 2023.
What is the timeline of events?
This can be found on the timeline section of the home page.
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.
