Service robots on their way? First steps of an interdisciplinary technology assessment

Interdisciplinary research calls together different scientific disciplines in order to answer a research question which cannot be answered by an individual discipline alone. Technology Assessment (TA) is a problem-oriented approach (Bechmann and Frederichs 1996) dealing with the non-technical aspects of technology development, in order to gain knowledge about the (un-)intended consequences, the (un-)desired impacts, the main and side-effects and the chances and risks of (new) technologies. Moreover, by applying TA, scientists can develop potential solutions to solve societal or political problems related to, for example, the ‘‘grand challenges’’ such as ‘‘feeding 10 billion people,’’ demographic change, global health. These societal problems need to be reframed or transformed into research questions to be dealt with by interdisciplinary research. Which scientific disciplines are invited to participate in an interdisciplinary research project is defined with respect to these research questions, namely those which are identified as to be relevant to answer them. Therefore, framing the problems and developing research questions out of it becomes the key for any interdisciplinary project (Decker 2001). For the interdisciplinary TA project on service robotics, to which the papers of this focus contribute, the problem setting and the identification of the relevant disciplines were described elsewhere (Decker et al. 2011; Decker 2012). Since the project aims for a TA of service robotics on a general level (even though referring to case studies for illustration), the relevant disciplines include economics, ethics, jurisprudence and psychology of work. While the first three are traditionally part of an