Ethical and social aspects of robots

Robotics is a very fast growing field especially in the last years and is a discipline based on: mechanics, physics/mathematics, control engineering, electr(on)ics, computer science. Therefore robots are frequently used as examples for Mechatronic Systems. Robotics unifies two cultures: Science and humanities. The effort to design roboethics should make the unity of these two cultures a primary assumption. This means that experts shall view Robotics as a whole in spite of the current early stage which recalls a melting pot. Some decades ago social aspects of robotics were discussed. Because of the results and the rapid development of this field ethical issues became more and more important. Therefore the term roboethics was introduced in the literature. The main goal of this contribution is to present and discuss this subject, probably at the first time, from the viewpoint of robotics. First an overview from a practical, robotics viewpoint will be given. Then a short presentation of currently and in the future available robots and some ideas about the ethical problems are discussed. Special emphasis is on the ethical behavior of the system “human-robot” and “End of Life – EoL” management.