Ethics by Design : A Conceptual Approach to Personal and Service Robot Systems

design of robots is driven largely by application area. Industrial robots have no need to be lightweight, soft or compliant, and, being inherently unsafe to humans, they are kept physically out of reach of factory workers. This approach is not tenable for personal and service robots, since, in addition to having an informational interface, people will expect human-robot interaction to be familiar and as safe as daily human-human interaction. This position paper describes how approaching both the software design and hardware design to mimic human attributes in behavior, physical aspects and motion quality will embed ethics in a deep and fundamental fashion, very different from artificially constructing a control scheme on top of an intrinsically human-unsafe structure.