Using Doctrines for Human-Robot Collaboration to Guide Ethical Behavior

These issues are real. Robots with lethal capabilities are being deployed in several operational theaters. And mistakes are being made. Partly they are due to “fog of war” and the difficulty for remote operators to have a good operational awareness of the situation on the ground. But, as anecdotal evidence in for example Singer (2009) points out, another reason is unclarity in command, control and communication (C3) between operators, robots, and those in the field – an unclarity that gets compounded as all these actors are often geographically dispersed. And then, people die. We would like to argue that these issues concern us all. Most researchers eschew (direct) military research, and that might be a reason for why the issue of ensuring ethical behavior in robots has been largely marginalized in the fields of robotics, and human-robot interaction. Put somewhat over-simplified, “We don’t make robots that kill, we don’t want to, hence this doesn’t concern us.” But this just isn’t correct. Even when we disregard the impact of military robotics on the public perception of robots, risks and ethical considerations of right and wrong robot behavior go well beyond the military domain. We can find ample of examples in domains we (the authors) ourselves are active in: Urban Search & Rescue, and robots for