Practical issues on robotic education and challenges towards Roboethics Education

The rapidly increase of personal robotic platforms and their applications in Japan represents a great challenge for universities to introduce undergraduate students the basic knowledge required to develop intelligent automated mechanisms, by introducing in simple and efficient ways the basic components of robots as well as their application for solving real-world problems. In Japan, the proliferation of amateur robot contests has been introduced to motivate their interest to get involved in the robotics field. This is not only the case for tournaments supported by local governments and private companies. Several universities along Japan have been implementing Project-Based Learning (PBL) within their curricula as introduction for Mechatronic. For this purpose, at Waseda University, we focused in developing an education tool designed to introduce at different educational levels the principle of developing mechatronic systems. In particular, the development of an inverted pendulum mobile robot Waseda Wheeled Vehicle No. 2 (WV-2R) has been proposed. In this paper, an overview of the research results is detailed. Even that in many universities around the world has been promoting the introduction of robotic technology, little discussion has been done to analyze from an ethical point of view. In this paper, some issues related to both Robot Education and Engineering Ethical Education are give based on experiences carried out in Japan. Then, some points regarding the integration of RoboEthics Education are pointed out for discussion.