To view submitted ethical challenge proposals for ICRA 2023, click the button below:
***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.
Hackathon Challenge
The goal of the coding competition is to explore public perspectives on ethical challenges associated with designing a home service robot and foster innovative solutions that address these challenges. We invite participants of all coding skills level to develop a virtual robot that can fetch objects in a care home context while navigating complex ethical scenarios. Rather than a solution that only serves and is tailored to the needs of a single user, we encourage our participants to imagine being a programmer designing a product that will enter many different care homes, households in the near future and meeting the needs of a diverse set of stakeholders.
Participants need to implement one of the selected reports from the Ethics Challenge using Processing 4.
More details on Processing can be found here: https://processing.org/
The Scenario
Imagine you run an engineering consultancy tasked with creating a working prototype (e.g., a 2D simulation) of a personal robot that is able to bring various objects upon request in a home environment. Your task is to implement one of the submitted Ethics Challenge reports to address this challenge. We are supplying a Processing-based framework to run the ethical simulations. You are tasked with extending the framework to produce a prototype that operates within an elderly care facility that we have already defined within Processing. It is a single-floor elderly care home that includes the following rooms:
A map of the elderly care home that you will be using to implement your code.
The facility have these specific rooms, but the characters and items may or may not be concise within this list. You are free to add new characters or items as you wish. In the starter code you will find the following characters and items:
Characters
Staff Nurses
Residents
Guests/family members/friends/volunteers (non-residents)
Cleaners
Security Staff
Locations
Residents’ Rooms
Private Bathrooms
Medical Area
Living space
Kitchen
Dining space
Common Bathrooms/Showers
Entertainment room
Laundry Area
Interactable Objects
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
Sample Personas for the people in the elderly care Home
*Your team can add new personas.
Residents
Staff
Visitors
Robot Configuration
The robot has an arm with a suitable gripper and a wheeled mobile base with sensors that enables it to navigate throughout the space without issue (e.g., Tiago, Fetch, etc.)
Controlling the Robot
Every request is explicit and provided in the following form:
Person A requests Object x to be brought to [Person B or Location], where:
Person B may or may not be the same person as Person A
Location may or may not contain people.
Further details:
A Location is a room in the care home.
A Location can be empty, or have any number of Objects and/or Persons contained within it.
The robot always knows where an Object is currently located, and if it is in the possession of a given Person.
If a requested object is currently in the possession of a person, they may or may not choose to give the object to the robot.
As a bonus, you may also consider:
Error/failure rate: e.g. the possibility that the fetch bot may drop or misidentify an object.
hazard level (e.g., candy is okay for someone, but not okay for someone with diabetes).
Handling verbal request failure.
Hackathon Evaluation Criteria
Generalizeability (30%): How easy is it for a non-technical user of the demo to try different retrieval requests that have not been previously considered in the Ethics Challenge report or during the competition? How easy is it to add new objects, stakeholders, and other contextual elements into the system to try how the proposed robot design will handle novel retrieval requests?
Correspondence (30%): How well does the submission reflect the intentions expressed in the chosen Ethics Challenge report? If there are inaccuracies/limitations in the implementation, how well has it been documented?
Ingenuity (30%): How much creativity, simplicity, innovativeness, and thoughtfulness have been demonstrated in implementing proposed designs into the code? If enhancements have been made relative to the proposed design what were they and how well have they been documented?
Demo Quality (10%): How effectively does the demo communicate the proposed solution to the observers?
Hackathon Code Framework
You can download the started code from the link above.
The instruction of how to use the code is given below in the video tutorial. This tutorial shows a much simpler scenario than this year's competition. However, the procedure to use and modify the code is completely same.
Hackathon Code Submission
Submission Instruction:
Zip your whole project in one file.
Rename that file using your Team Name.
Submit the zip file using the button below:
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.
